Log CPU usage over time

Nikumba · 25 Feb 2011 at 16:29

I have had a look and the command top is mentioned, but after a simple guide to be able to run a program and log the CPU usages of it.

I can not have the task manager up as the program runs full screen

Kimbie

LiamJ · 25 Feb 2011 at 17:14

Desktop gadget whilst running the app in windowed mode?

If you can't run it windowed, there are some programs that allow you to log data to a .csv file, which you can then turn into a graph using Microsoft Excel.

GeForce · 25 Feb 2011 at 17:57

Would load averages suffice? If so, you could write a quick bash script to write `uptime` to a file and call it every x minutes with cron...

tntcoder · 25 Feb 2011 at 20:04

The sar program from the sysstat package does exactly what you want and logs loads over time. Install it and make sure the sysstat daemon is running. By default it logs the CPU ever 10 mins but that will be configurable.

Sample output on my box, set it to take 5 readings, every 5 seconds and send it out to a file or whatever:

Code:

[root@tcore rc.d]# sar -u 5 5
Linux 2.6.37-ARCH (tcore) 	25/02/11 	_x86_64_	(12 CPU)

20:01:28        CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait    %steal     %idle
20:01:33        all      0.11      0.00      0.06      0.02      0.00     99.81
20:01:38        all      0.32      0.00      0.05      0.00      0.00     99.62
20:01:43        all      0.02      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00     99.98
20:01:48        all      0.10      0.00      0.05      0.02      0.00     99.84
20:01:53        all      0.08      0.00      0.08      0.02      0.00     99.82
Average:        all      0.13      0.00      0.05      0.01      0.00     99.82

brendan · 26 Feb 2011 at 14:41

Suggestion above has my vote. If you want something a little more graphical and visual also maybe more stats have a look at munin. Its a monitoring agent that will publish results to a local web server and draw graphs. Very usefully and easy to set up compared to most solutions.

aldo1234 · 27 Feb 2011 at 13:48

munin is very good used it on a file server to help track down issues with slow file access on a ubuntu server.

FirebarUK · 27 Feb 2011 at 14:23

collectl as an alternative to sar, its much nicer. Supporting utility like Colplot provides the easy graphical bit.

Alternatively, consider Ganglia or Nagios perhaps. Collectl is very lightweight though.