cpu usage display conky vs. top

[lee]

Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 05:13:12PM +0200, lee wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> does anyone know what conky displays as CPU usage for a process?  The
>> values are different in conky and top, for example, top might show 11.6
>> for a process while conky says 3.01.
>
> Not on my system.  The polling times are a bit different I think, so I
> see same ballpark numbers: 2.53 vs 2.4, etc.

Yes, top has 3 seconds update interval by default, and I have conky at
10 seconds.  I wish I knew what the effect of that actually is,
i. e. will it display averages for the last 10 seconds, or does it
always display what it is seeing at the very moment the information is
displayed?

> Maybe you could fiddle with these two:
>
>   cpu_avg_samples 2

Do you know what this actually does?  Google hasn't been helpful at all
with it.

It didn't seem to change anything.  The documentation only says "The
number of samples to average for CPU monitoring.".

Afaik, the cpu load is read from /proc/stat.  Does conky read this file
more often per update interval when you increase cpu_avg_samples?

>   update_interval 1.0

Even with an update interval of one second in both conky and top, there
is no correlation between the cpu usage for the process.  With
'cpu_avg_samples 4', conky shows something between 0.5 and 1.10 for a
process that is around 3% in top.


BTW, conky also ignores an update interval specified for mail checking.
I specified an hour and it updates every 10 seconds.  Maybe I'll write
my own monitor so I do know what it does, or stay with xosview ...


-- 
Fedora release 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat)