How to monitor top applications using CPU (and IO if possible) in a graph

cpudisk-usagepidtop

I need to find what and when these applications used so much CPU (and IO if possible too). This should be in a graphic timeline like we see in GNOME System Monitor CPU History. I also want to compare that graphic with the Psensor temperature monitor too.

I found answers for single process where you already know the PID, but I am looking for that information whenever the applications are top-using CPU or IO, which can be any pid any time, on the last 1 hour.

I wonder if there is some application that can do it.

Best Answer

I thought it might be fun to take a stab at this one with python and matplotlib. It's a bit big for posting here but here is a link to it on my site. This is a real ugly way to get it done but hopefully it will give you some ideas. I just parsed the output of ps and pulled the cpu temp stuff from the output of sysctl since I'm on an OpenBSD box but it works well enough.. I suppose you could get pretty fancy with the data acquisition part and come up with a ton of different things. If you'd like I can put it up on github or something.

-jamil

Related Solutions

Load Average in Top Output – Interpretation Across Distributions

The CPU load is the length of the run queue, i.e. the length of the queue of processes waiting to be run.

The uptime command may be used to see the average length of the run queue over the last minute, the last five minutes, and the last 15 minutes, just like what's usually displayed by top.

A high load value means the run queue is long. A low value means that it is short. So, if the one minute load average is 0.05, it means that on average during that minute, there was 0.05 processes waiting to run in the run queue. It is not a percentage. This is, AFAIK, the same on all Unices (although some Unices may not count processes waiting for I/O, which I think Linux does; OpenBSD, for a while only, also counted kernel threads, so that the load was always 1 or more).

The Linux top utility gets the load values from the kernel, which writes them to /proc/loadavg. Looking at the sources for procps-3.2.8, we see that:

To display the load averages, the sprint_uptime() function is called in top.c.
This function lives in proc/whattime.c and calls loadavg() in proc/sysinfo.c.
That function simply opens LOADAVG_FILE to read the load averages.
LOADAVG_FILE is defined earlier as "/proc/loadavg".

Linux – how to disable color in output of ‘top’ command

Here's one way to disable colored output in top:

Step 1: Run top

Step 2: Press the z key to toggle the color mode

Step 3: Press the W key to save the new setting

For reference, look at the top man page, specifically Section 4: Interactive Commands. There you will find the following descriptions of these two interactive commands:

W  :Write-the-Configuration-File
    This will save all of your options and toggles plus the
    current display mode and delay time.  By issuing this command
    just before quitting top, you will be able restart later in
    exactly that same state.

z  :Color/Monochrome toggle
    Switches the `current' window between your last used color
    scheme and the older form of black-on-white or white-on-black.
    This command will alter both the summary area and task area
    but does not affect the state of the `x', `y' or `b' toggles.

Also see these related posts:

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Load Average in Top Output – Interpretation Across Distributions

Linux – how to disable color in output of ‘top’ command

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