Ubuntu – Monitoring CPU and temperature

I belive atop allows to monitor even short programs. Powertop allows to monitor states of processor. However if the peaks are hardly noticable it is unlikely that it caused this problem.

There are however few possible causes:

• Corrected ACPI handling. For some reasons the temperature in ACPI was read incorrectly and the correct temperature was always 15°C highier (or incorrect). Does the computer feels warmer
• The newer kernel may have worst temperature management (like lacking p4-clockmod etc.) - it may be bug in kernel.
• Previously mentioned dust.

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