Hi,

Can anyone give me an idea of how to get the CPU idle time? Is using the output from "top" the only way?

I cannot afford to write the script to parse the ouput from "top", as I need to run the jobs in various machines with one, two and four processor nodes.

So, i need a script that can deliver cpu load in the form of %idle, so that i can submit the jobs to those nodes that are free.

Regards,
Shyam

You can take a look at /proc/stat:
For explanation of the various fileds:

Hi,

the CPU idle % is actually (100 - used %).

for calculating the used % you can use

ps -eo "%C"

It will list all the processes's CPU usage in %. Now you can safely remove those with " 0.0% " or idle processes.

Count all the non-zero %s and subtract from 100.

-Rahul.

Or use some more advanced monitoring tools like nagios or gkrellm.
They're probably graphical, but may have a command line interface too.

I tried the script using ps... But, the point is, in multi-cpu machine, the idle time is shown as more than 100%. in a dual cpu, it is 200%, and for four cpu node, it is 400%. That is where I got stuck up

gkrellm should be able to fix that. I havent tried it myself because i only have one processor but it should show you the load on each processor individually

The nodes donot have the gkrellm and nagios... For now, the only option i have is to find the number of processors from a script and then use ps to find the cpu % and subtract it from {num_proc*100}...

But, isnt it surprising that there is no script to give u the idle time straight away? How does one perform load balancing if one doesnot know the idle % of a node?

Can it be found out in run time? I mean in a C code?

and, also, can anyone help me how to add a list of cpu % from an output of a ps command? I know it can be done with awk... but, am just learning shell programming... In short, I need a script that gives me CPU % as a number

Thanks guyz...

ok I believe enough has been said about the idle time and using various tools. Being a Linux preson we should not be tempted to go for tools rather put your hands on some shell scripting


Here is the Linux matra for CPUs

command:- cat /proc/stat| grep cpu

output:-

#cpu (user system nice idle)---->processes
cpu 1347655 198648 156415 131616078
cpu0 408592 50247 49112 32821748
cpu1 291843 51332 33225 32953299
cpu2 336032 49001 39752 32904914
cpu3 311188 48068 34326 32936117


here the values are in jiffers (unsigned long int). The sum total and the max. value for a CPU is 33329699

that means
cpu0 408592 + 50247 + 49112 + 32821748 = 33329699


hence idle % for CPU 0 ==> (32821748/33329699)*100


cheers

dont go for readymade solutions when you can work with your own

Let me know if anyone has any questions about it.

-Rahul.