cpustat - a tool to measure CPU utilization.
cpustat [ options ] [delay [count]]
cpustat is a program that dumps the CPU utilization of current
running tasks (that is, processes or kernel threads). cpustat is useful to
monitor the activity of long lived processes in a system, such as daemons,
kernel threads as well as typical user processes.
cpustat shows only the tasks that have measured any change in
their CPU activity between each sample interval (as indicated by an
increment in the CPU tick count stats of utime and stime in
/proc/$pid/stat). cpustat thus only reports activity of busy tasks that are
still alive at the time of each sample snapshot and hence will not account
for very short lived processes that exist between each sample period.
For each running task that has consumed some CPU during the sample
time, the following information is displayed:
| Heading |
Description |
| %CPU |
Total CPU used (in percent) |
| %USR |
CPU used in user space (in percent) |
| %SYS |
CPU used in system (kernel) space (in percent) |
| PID |
Process ID |
| S |
Process State |
| CPU |
CPU used by the process at time of sampling. |
| Time |
Total CPU time used by the process since it started. |
| Task |
Process command line information (from process cmdline or comm
fields) |
cpustat was designed to try and minimize the CPU overhead of
process statistics gathering and reporting. It is therefore ideal for small
embedded devices where CPU is limited where measuring CPU utilisation may
affect the overall CPU statistics. For this reason, it is not as complex as
tools such as top(1) that have a more feature rich user interface.
| R |
Running |
| S |
Sleeping |
| D |
Waiting, Disk Sleep |
| T |
Stopped |
| t |
Tracing stopped |
| W |
Paging |
| X or x |
Dead |
| K |
Wakekill |
| W |
Waking |
| P |
Parked |
cpustat options are as follow:
- -a
- calculate CPU utilisation based on all CPUs. For example, if a process is
using 100% of 1 CPU and the system has 4 CPUs, then the utilisation will
show as 25%. The default is to show utilisation on a per CPU basis.
- -c
- get command information from process comm field.
- -d
- strip directory basename off command information.
- -D
- compute and show the distribution of CPU utilisation by task and by CPU.
By task, this breaks the CPU utilisation of each task into 20 ranges from
minimum to the maximum and shows the count of tasks found at in that
particular utilisation range. Useful to see any outliers and to
characterize the typical per task usage of the CPU.
By CPU, this shows the user and system CPU utilisation by per CPU.
- -g
- show grand total of CPU utilisation statistics at the end of the run. This
is the total cumulatave CPU used by each process, averaged over the entire
run duration.
- -h
- show help.
- -i
- ignore cpustat in the statistics.
- -l
- show long (full) command information.
- -n task_count
- only display the first task_count number of top tasks.
- -p PID
- only display process that matches the given PID.
- -q
- run quietly, only really makes sense with -r option.
- -r csv_file
- output gathered data in a comma separated values file. This can be then
imported and graphed using your favourite open source spread sheet. The
%CPU utilisation (system and user) for each process at each sample time is
output into a table.
- -s
- show short command information.
- -S
- show time stamp. If the -r option is used then an extra column appears in
the CSV output file with the time of day for each sample.
- -t threshold
- ignore samples where the CPU usage delta per second less than the given
threshold.
- -T
- calculate total CPU utilisation.
- -x
- show extra CPU related statistics, namely: CPU load average over 1, 5 and
10 minutes, CPU frequency (average of all online CPU frequencies), number
of CPUs online.
- -X
- run in curses based "top" like mode; this will make cpustat
consume more CPU cycles as it adds on more display handling overhead.
cpustat
- Dump CPU stats every second until stopped.
cpustat -n 20 60
- Dump the top 20 CPU consuming tasks every 60 seconds until stopped.
cpustat 10 5
- Dump CPU stats every 10 seconds just 5 times.
cpustat -x -D -a 1 300
- Gather stats every second for 5 minutes with extra CPU stats and show CPU
utilisation distributions per task and per CPU at the end of the run.
Also, scale CPU utilisation by the number of CPUs so that 100% utilisation
means 100% of all CPUs rather than 100% of 1 CPU.
cpustat was written by Colin Ian King
<colin.i.king@gmail.com>
This manual page was written by Colin Ian King
<colin.i.king@gmail.com>, for the Ubuntu project (but may be used by
others).
Copyright © 2011-2021 Canonical Ltd, Copyright ©
2021 Colin Ian King
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE.