devizer / Universe.CpuUsage

CPU Usage for .NET Core and .NET Framework for Linux, Windows and macOS with coverage of async/await scenarios.

Universe.CpuUsage    

CPU Usage for .NET Core, .NET Framework and Mono on Linux, Windows and macOS

Crossplatform CPU Usage metrics

It receives the amount of time that the current thread(s)/process has executed in kernel and user mode.

Works everywhere: Linux, OSX and Windows.

Targets everywhere: Net Framework 2.0+, Net Standard 1.3+, Net Core 1.0+

Coverage and supported OS

Minimum OS requirements: Linux Kernel 2.6.26, Mac OS 10.9, Windows XP/2003

Autotests using .NET Core and .NET Framework cover:

• Linux x86_64 and Arm 64-bit on appveyor
• Windows Server 2016 on appveyor
• macOS 10.14 on travis-ci.org
• Raspbian 10 Buster on Azure Piplines using self-hosted agent on Raspberry pi

Autotests using Mono:

• Linux x86_64, Arm 64-bit, Arm-v7 32 bit, i386 using mono on travis-ci.org
• Mac OSX 10.10 using travis-ci.org

Manually tested on:

• Windows 7 x86 (.NET Core), Windows 10 ARM64 (.NET Core)
• FreeBSD 12 (both .NET Core and Mono).
• Debian 8 on armv5 (Mono)

appveyor	travis-ci
.NET Core: Linux x64, Windows x64. Mono: Linux x64.	.NET Core: macOS 10.14, Linux Arm 64. Mono: Linux Arm 64, Arm-v7, i386, macOS 10.10.

Integration tests on exotic platforms

For mono only platforms (i386, ppc64, mips, arm v5/v6, etc) here is the script for integration tests: test-on-mono-only-platforms.sh

url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devizer/Universe.CpuUsage/master/test-on-mono-only-platforms.sh;
(wget -q -nv --no-check-certificate -O - $url 2>/dev/null || curl -ksSL $url) | bash

Implementation

The implementation utilizes platform invocation (P/Invoke) of the corresponding system libraries depending on the OS:

OS	per thread implementation	per process implementation	library
Linux	getrusage(RUSAGE_THREAD)	getrusage(RUSAGE_SELF)	libc.so
Windows	GetThreadTimes()	GetProcessTimes()	kernel32.dll
Mac OS X	thread_info()	getrusage(RUSAGE_SELF)	libSystem.dylib

Precision depends on

Here is a summary of CPU usage precision. In general, it depends on OS and version and it does not depend on CPU performance except of FreeBSD

OS	Average Precision
Windows Server 2019, Xeon E5-2697 v3	16,250 μs
Linux, Xeon E5-2697 v3 @ 2.60GHz, kernel 5.0	3,800 μs
Linux, ARMv7 H3 CPU, 1.50GHz, kernel 3.4	10,000 μs
Linux, ARMv7 H3 CPU, 1.10GHz, kernel 4.19	3,800 μs
Mac OS 10.14, Xeon E5-2697 v2 @ 2.70GHz	14.0 μs
FreeBSD 12, .NET Core 2.0, Xeon E3-1270 v2 @ 3.50GHz, pseudo kernel 2.6.32	3.0 μs
FreeBSD 12, Mono 5.1, Xeon E3-1270 v2 @ 3.50GHz, native BSD 12	1.9 μs

Detailed histograms of precision are produced by PrecisionTest.cs

Low level API: class CpuUsage

var onStart = CpuUsage.GetByThread();
... 
var onEnd = CpuUsage.GetByThread();
Console.WriteLine("CPU Usage: " + (onEnd-onStart));

High level API: class CpuUsageAsyncWatcher

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
{
    // Here is a "middleware" that displays total CPU usage
    // of all the Tasks executed by ASP.NET Core pipeline during each http request
    app.Use(async (context, next) =>
    {
        CpuUsageAsyncWatcher watcher = new CpuUsageAsyncWatcher();
        await next.Invoke();
        watcher.Stop();
        Console.WriteLine($"Cpu Usage by http request is {watcher.GetSummaryCpuUsage()}");
    });
}

Benchmark

Just for illustration here is a comparison to well known DateTime.Now and Stopwatch using benchmark.net. All of them are taken using .NET Core 3.0 runtime.

Linux x64, kernel 4.15

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Rank	Gen 0	Gen 1	Gen 2	Allocated
DateTime.Now()	150.24 ns	2.346 ns	2.194 ns	2	-	-	-	-
Stopwatch	77.27 ns	0.473 ns	0.419 ns	1	0.0095	-	-	40 B
Process CPU Usage	795.18 ns	8.000 ns	6.681 ns	3	-	-	-	-
Thread CPU Usage	834.59 ns	9.324 ns	8.722 ns	4	-	-	-	-

Linux 32 bit @ ARM, kernel 3.4 (Orange PI, H3, 1500 MHz)

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Rank	Gen 0	Gen 1	Gen 2	Allocated
DateTime.Now	2.788 μs	0.0595 μs	0.0944 μs	2	-	-	-	-
Stopwatch	1.737 μs	0.0539 μs	0.0504 μs	1	0.1945	-	-	32 B
Process CPU Usage	5.552 μs	0.1662 μs	0.4900 μs	3	-	-	-	-
Thread CPU Usage	5.664 μs	0.1136 μs	0.1960 μs	3	-	-	-	-

macOS 10.14

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Rank	Gen 0	Gen 1	Gen 2	Allocated
DateTime.Now()	73.40 ns	1.506 ns	2.475 ns	1	-	-	-	-
Stopwatch	79.36 ns	1.640 ns	1.454 ns	2	0.0025	-	-	40 B
Process CPU Usage	1,979.10 ns	29.771 ns	26.391 ns	4	-	-	-	-
Thread CPU Usage	1,921.54 ns	35.869 ns	33.552 ns	3	-	-	-	-

Windows Server 2016

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Rank	Gen 0	Gen 1	Gen 2	Allocated
DateTime.Now()	217.08 ns	1.667 ns	1.559 ns	4	-	-	-	-
Stopwatch	31.12 ns	0.203 ns	0.169 ns	1	0.0095	-	-	40 B
Process CPU Usage	200.49 ns	3.743 ns	3.501 ns	2	-	-	-	-
Thread CPU Usage	205.11 ns	3.970 ns	4.413 ns	3	-	-	-	-

Legend

• Stopwatch: var sw = new Stopwatch(); var ticks = sw.ElapsedTicks;
• Process CPU Usage: CpuUsageReader.GetByProcess();
• Thread CPU Usage: CpuUsageReader.GetByThread();
• ns - nanosecond, μs - microsecond