Memtester

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Memtester is a linux/BSD userspace program for testing currently unallocated memory.

That means you can't test all memory (like e.g. memtest86+), and actually finding a serious memory fault may still trigger a kernel panic or similar anyway.

It's still quite useful if you suspect memory faults, but don't yet want to dedicate the host to running memtest86+ for a day.

Memtester will try to lock memory before starting its tests, which means you need to run it as root (if it tries all allocation sizes down to zero, you forgot to do that)

It's CPU-heavy so you may want to run it via nice.

It's output-heavy, to the point where doing this via ssh may mean it's hard to stop once it's going. You probably want to redirect its output to a log.

In its most basic use it is probably not really predictable which memory it tests, and you should not test all memory at once if you like the host's stability.

See also:

• http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/
• https://linux.die.net/man/8/memtester