How accurate is Conky

conkyperformance

I'm on Crunchbang 64 bit, Conky shows that I'm using 4% of my CPU.

But I can feel the CPU burning so hot, got Spotify, Chrome and couple other apps running. On windows 7 chrome uses about half of the CPU, how come everything uses only 4% on Crunchbang (I'm using the same chrome version and same plugins and everything on Windows and Crunchbang), sometimes I see the CPU usage like 6% or 8%, even that is too low.

I know that Crunchbang is lightweight that's why I installed it but the numbers I'm seeing are hard to believe, something isn't right.

Edit

My Conky.conf and my Conkyrc.

As of right now, CPU usage between 2% and 4%, CPU temp between 84 and 86 degrees Celsius. (Between 183 and 186 degrees Fahrenheit), I'm using lm-sensors to monitor the CPU temperature.

Best Answer

I would suggest using the application lm_sensors to get your systems temperature readings. You can see the output by of this command with the command sensors.

For example:

$ sensors
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +56.0°C  (crit = +100.0°C)

thinkpad-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
fan1:        3815 RPM
temp1:        +56.0°C  
temp2:         +0.0°C  
temp3:         +0.0°C  
temp4:         +0.0°C  
temp5:         +0.0°C  
temp6:         +0.0°C  
temp7:         +0.0°C  
temp8:         +0.0°C

Setting it up can be tricky sometimes though.

Setup

Depending on your distro you'll likely have to give the command apt-get install lm_sensors or yum install lm_sensors.

Once installed it needs to be configured. You can use the tool provided to do this, sensors-detect. It's interactive (in a terminal) so you'll have to answer several questions to help it identify your system. This is usually the step that trips most people up, but give it a try.

Back to conky

Once you have lm_sensors installed and configured you can add lines like these to incorporate output from external commands into conky's display.

For example, say we want to grab the temperature from the sensor's command. This line from the output above:

temp1:        +56.0°C

This command will grab just the value:

$ sensors|grep temp1|tail -1|awk '{print $2}'
+56.0°C

To get conky to do this you'd add a line like this to your .conf file:

${execi 20 sensors |grep temp1|tail -1|awk '{print $2}'}

You can then incorporate the above line into your .conf file where ever you'd like the temperature to show up.

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