There are two main tools to keep track of your CPU usage: top and vmstat.
-
topis an interactive tool: it shows you the CPU usage of each process, as well as overall statistics, updated every 5 seconds. It’s good for hands-on checking.
#top 17:18:34 up 2 days, 8:14, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
47 processes: 46 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.1% user 0.1% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 99.6% idle
Mem: 1030872k av, 1022256k used, 8616k free,
0k shrd, 104844k buff
777088k actv, 12k in_d, 22296k in_c
Swap: 2048276k av, 8120k used, 2040156k free
640080k cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
30776 root 19 0 1140 1140 852 R 0.9 0.1 0:00 0 top
1 root 15 0 504 464 436 S 0.0 0.0 0:03 0 init (...)
But say you want to get just one number (percentage) back, so you can use it for logging. -
vmstatwil give you the following output:
#vmstat
procs memory swap io system cpu
r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id
0 0 0 7964 8804 104712 640224 0 0 2 16 129 27 0 0 100
You can run
vmstat 1 5to get 5 consecutive measurements (1 second apart). The number we want is the average CPU usage, or (100% – idle). The following command will do the job:
#vmstat 1 5 | gawk "/0/ {tot=tot+1; id=id+$16} END {print 100 - id/tot}"
gives
0.4
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As vmstat manpage says, in the “continuous report with delay” mode “… the first report given is the average of the statistics since system boot”. So the command above will give wrong number if we don’t skip the first result.