How to calculate the CPU usage of a process by PID in Linux from C?
You need to parse out the data from /proc/<PID>/stat
. These are the first few fields (from Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
in your kernel source):
Table 1-3: Contents of the stat files (as of 2.6.22-rc3).............................................................................. Field Content pid process id tcomm filename of the executable state state (R is running, S is sleeping, D is sleeping in an uninterruptible wait, Z is zombie, T is traced or stopped) ppid process id of the parent process pgrp pgrp of the process sid session id tty_nr tty the process uses tty_pgrp pgrp of the tty flags task flags min_flt number of minor faults cmin_flt number of minor faults with child's maj_flt number of major faults cmaj_flt number of major faults with child's utime user mode jiffies stime kernel mode jiffies cutime user mode jiffies with child's cstime kernel mode jiffies with child's
You're probably after utime
and/or stime
. You'll also need to read the cpu
line from /proc/stat
, which looks like:
cpu 192369 7119 480152 122044337 14142 9937 26747 0 0
This tells you the cumulative CPU time that's been used in various categories, in units of jiffies. You need to take the sum of the values on this line to get a time_total
measure.
Read both utime
and stime
for the process you're interested in, and read time_total
from /proc/stat
. Then sleep for a second or so, and read them all again. You can now calculate the CPU usage of the process over the sampling time, with:
user_util = 100 * (utime_after - utime_before) / (time_total_after - time_total_before);sys_util = 100 * (stime_after - stime_before) / (time_total_after - time_total_before);
Make sense?
getrusage() can help you in determining the usage of current process or its child
Update:I can't remember an API. But all details will be in /proc/PID/stat, so if we could parse it, we can get the percentage.
EDIT:Since CPU % is not straight forward to calculate, You could use sampling kind of stuff here. Read ctime and utime for a PID at a point in time and read the same values again after 1 sec. Find the difference and divide by hundred. You will get utilization for that process for past one second.
(might get more complex if there are many processors)
Easy step to step for beginners like me:
- Read the first line of
/proc/stat
to gettotal_cpu_usage1
.
sscanf(line,"%*s %llu %llu %llu %llu",&user,&nice,&system,&idle); total_cpu_usage1 = user + nice + system + idle;
- Read
/proc/pid/stat
wherepid
is the PID of the process you want to know the CPU usage, like this:
sscanf(line, "%*d %*s %*c %*d" //pid,command,state,ppid "%*d %*d %*d %*d %*u %*lu %*lu %*lu %*lu" "%lu %lu" //usertime,systemtime "%*ld %*ld %*ld %*ld %*ld %*ld %*llu" "%*lu", //virtual memory size in bytes ....)
- Now sum
usertime
andsystemtime
and getproc_times1
- Now wait 1 second or more
- Do it again, and get
total_cpu_usage2
andproc_times2
The formula is:
(number of processors) * (proc_times2 - proc_times1) * 100 / (float) (total_cpu_usage2 - total_cpu_usage1)
You can get the amount of CPU's from /proc/cpuinfo
.