Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2018

schedule

Adding performance counters to htop


Typical userspace process monitoring tools usually show some general metrics like CPU% usage, Memory%, CPU time and so on, which have been around for a long time. In this lightning talk, I will discuss some other performance measurements available in modern systems, like hardware performance counters, and talk about their inclusion in htop, in hopes that these powerful metrics will reach a wider audience.

htop is an interactive process viewer for Unix systems. Typical userspace process monitoring tools, either textual or graphical, usually show some general metrics like CPU% usage, Memory totals and percentages, CPU time and so on. These are essentially the same set of metrics which have been around for a long time, since the days of the original Unix top.

However, newer process metrics have become available over the years, usually "hidden" in more advanced tools such as systemtap and perf-events.

In this lightning talk, I will discuss some of these performance measurements available in modern systems, such as Hardware Performance Counters, and talk about their inclusion in htop, in hopes that these powerful metrics will reach a wider audience.

Speakers

Photo of Hisham Muhammad Hisham Muhammad

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