How can I monitor the thread count of a process on linux?
To get the number of threads for a given pid:
$ ps -o nlwp <pid>
Where nlwp
stands for Number of Light Weight Processes (threads). Thus ps
aliases nlwp
to thcount
, which means that
$ ps -o thcount <pid>
does also work.
If you want to monitor the thread count, simply use watch
:
$ watch ps -o thcount <pid>
To get the sum of all threads running in the system:
$ ps -eo nlwp | tail -n +2 | awk '{ num_threads += $1 } END { print num_threads }'
Each thread in a process creates a directory under /proc/<pid>/task
. Count the number of directories, and you have the number of threads.