Question

I want to increase my CPU usage through a java program, albeit in a controlled manner. Say, a user can specify a parameter like “high”, “medium” or “low” and I should be able to increase the CPU by a certain amount depending on the user’s choice. Lets say for high I want it to increase by 5%, for medium by 3% and for low by 1%.
Is this possible with a clean and efficient method (not just using while and for loops)? IF yes, then how and what will be the precision and accuracy?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can modify the CPU load incurred by a Java program by inserting sleep statements (e.g. Thread.sleep()) in your code, using variable delays to change the load. The simplest case would be a sleep statement in a loop, executed in a separate thread for each CPU core that you want to load.

That said, Java is not suitable for this task – not if you actually need the kind of precision that you are describing. The garbage collector and other factors make its behavior rather unpredictable.

In my own applications I regularly get throughput variations in the 10% range for the same input, with no apparent cause. It is for this reason that Java is not considered suitable for real-time applications either.

It might help us provide a better answer if you mentioned for what purpose you need to do something like that – and, perhaps, why you need to do in Java…