This article discusses the internals about how Linux calculates CPU utilization for a process.

What is Real time and Process time? Link to heading

Real Time: It is an actual elapsed time that we observe on the wall clock.

Process Time: It is the amount of CPU time used by a process.

What are Jiffies? Link to heading

  • Process Time in Linux is measured in Jiffies. Jiffies are measured in “HZ”.
  • Jiffies value can be fetched via sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK) system call.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import os
print(os.sysconf(os.sysconf_names['SC_CLK_TCK']))

# 100

# 1 second = 100 Jiffies

How to fetch Jiffies in Linux? Link to heading

  • Total Jiffies for all CPU(s) and individual CPU can be fetched from /proc/stat.
$ cat /proc/stat | grep cpu

# CPU user nice system idle iowait irq softirq steal guest guest_nice

cpu 365430 546 105481 2862563 1252 0 10568 0 0 0
cpu0 47076 48 15238 743800 329 0 2116 0 0 0
cpu1 43550 43 14460 303602 26 0 1584 0 0 0
cpu2 46679 39 12309 302736 21 0 1053 0 0 0
cpu3 46041 72 12112 303436 15 0 636 0 0 0
cpu4 46400 90 13997 300582 568 0 661 0 0 0
cpu5 46818 16 13045 301880 188 0 2931 0 0 0
cpu6 44507 31 12307 302683 64 0 1213 0 0 0
cpu7 44356 58 12010 303840 38 0 370 0 0 0
  • Jiffies for a particular process can be fetched from /proc/{pid}/stat.
cat /proc/3465/stat | awk '{print $14, $15, $16, $17}'

# User System User(Waited for Children) System(Waited for Children)

59175 13926 52717 10318
  • Total and Process CPU time (User + System) can be sampled across pre-defined time interval to obtain the utilization.

For eg: If Total CPU time (User + System) across 8 cores is 450 Jiffies (sampled per second) and Process CPU time (User + System + User of Children + System of Children) is 50 Jiffies (sampled per second), then utilization in percentage can be calculated as follows:

# Percentage = (100 * Process Jiffies)/Total CPU Jiffies

(100 * 50)/450 = 11.111%
  • Jiffies can be converted to Real Time (seconds) via (Jiffies/100) as 1 second = 100 Jiffies, it may be greater than Real Time if a Process utilizes more than one CPU or Core.

Golang Snippet Link to heading

This Golang snippet samples CPU utilization per second.

Output Link to heading

$ go run main.go

Enter the PID:3465

Logging CPU % for PID 3465
2.564103%
3.947368%
0.000000%
0.000000%
4.166667%
0.000000%
1.190476%
3.773585%