How to Get Total CPU Usage in Linux Using C++

How to get total cpu usage in Linux using C++

cat /proc/stat

http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/procstat.htm

I agree with this answer above. The cpu line in this file gives the total number of "jiffies" your system has spent doing different types of processing.

What you need to do is take 2 readings of this file, seperated by whatever interval of time you require. The numbers are increasing values (subject to integer rollover) so to get the %cpu you need to calculate how many jiffies have elapsed over your interval, versus how many jiffies were spend doing work.

e.g.
Suppose at 14:00:00 you have

cpu 4698 591 262 8953 916 449 531

total_jiffies_1 = (sum of all values) = 16400

work_jiffies_1 = (sum of user,nice,system = the first 3 values) = 5551

and at 14:00:05 you have

cpu 4739 591 289 9961 936 449 541

total_jiffies_2 = 17506

work_jiffies_2 = 5619

So the %cpu usage over this period is:

work_over_period = work_jiffies_2 - work_jiffies_1 = 68

total_over_period = total_jiffies_2 - total_jiffies_1 = 1106

%cpu = work_over_period / total_over_period * 100 = 6.1%

Hope that helps a bit.

C Program to get CPU usage for a PID and all its children

Yes, the parent needs to wait for the CPU time of the children to be added in (see manual entry for getrusage link). Also see this answer for more details.

How to get the CPU Usage in C?

This is platform-specific:

• In Windows, you can use the GetProcessTimes() function.
• In Linux, you can actually just use clock().

These can be used to measure the amount of CPU time taken between two time intervals.

EDIT :

To get the CPU consumption (as a percentage), you will need to divide the total CPU time by the # of logical cores that the OS sees, and then divided by the total wall-clock time:

% CPU usage = (CPU time) / (# of cores) / (wall time)

Getting the # of logical cores is also platform-specific:

• Windows: GetSystemInfo()
• Linux: sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN)

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?

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