12

When I use TOP command, I could get the following info:

shell@android:/ $ top -n 1 User 31%, System 10%, IOW 0%, IRQ 0% User 346 + Nice 10 + Sys 120 + Idle 637 + IOW 6 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 2 = 1121 PID PR CPU% S #THR VSS RSS PCY UID Name 481 1 26% S 89 762832K 81688K fg system system_server 1699 0 5% S 27 676472K 39092K fg u0_a72 wm.cs.systemmonitor 11243 0 3% S 28 673140K 29796K bg u0_a111 com.weather.Weather 13327 2 1% S 23 680472K 35844K bg u0_a83 com.rhmsoft.fm 659 0 1% S 17 663044K 33136K bg u0_a13 android.process.media 20260 1 0% R 1 1208K 508K shell top

We can see the CPU% is round to integer, is there any way I could get a process's CPU% with higher precision?

-- Clarifications on the bounty -- Alex

The question refers to Android system, and preferably to a non-rooted device. While Android provides advanced profiling techniques for Java applications, tools for native code (C++) are limited. top command on Android allows to show the statistics for all threads running in the system, both Java threads and C++ threads. I am looking for an answer that will help with the following quest:

My app uses 2% CPU when it is inactive in background, while it should be below 0.1%. If I run top -t, I get 0% for all 15 threads that belong to my process (some threads are Java threads, e.g. the Main, UI thread; others are pthreads that never attach to JVM). How can I guess which thread eats the battery?

I would be glad to get even more details about this unexpected activity, and Android provides great helpers like TraceView for Java threads. Any insight regarding tools for native code will be highly appreciated.

Improve this question
10
  • 2
    wouldn't make much difference.... Commented Mar 1, 2013 at 0:19
  • 1
    @MitchWheat: Yes it does make difference. Otherwise, please help me profile the application that uses 2% CPU in background. When I run top -t, I get 0% for all 15 threads that belong to my process. How can I guess which thread eats the battery? Commented Jun 27, 2013 at 7:42
  • 1
    user568109: of 15 threads, all show 0%. But together they give quite significant 2%. Some threads are Java, and there are SDK tools to monitor their behavior. Others are C++, and I wanted to get from a simple top command enough hibts to help me find the 2 that are responsible for most consumption. Commented Jun 27, 2013 at 18:38
  • 1
    @CommonsWare: definitely, this is a bug in my app. But a full code review that would resolve the issue is beyond my capabilities. If I could concentrate on one thread, it would become possible. Commented Jul 1, 2013 at 7:15
  • 1
    @Gene: please provide an Answer with the content of your comment, it deserves the bounty. The command line is adb shell cat /proc/${pid}/task/*/stat | awk -F\ '{print $1, $14}' (note that awk runs on the host). Commented Jul 1, 2013 at 7:20

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
6
+500

You didn't mention it in your post, but in the comment you said that you really need CPU utilization per thread, not per process.

If you can't find a tool that's accurate enough, you can look directly in /proc/[pid]/task/[ThreadName] as described in the man page for /proc. This gives total CPU time consumed in "clock ticks" since execution began. Getting better resolution than this is probably difficult or impossible.

Edit

From the OP's comment, a command that lists the relevant information is:

adb shell cat /proc/${pid}/task/*/stat | awk -F\ '{print $1, $14}'

This just cats the correct /proc files to the debugging host, which runs a tiny awk program to print the columns for pid and user time. You could also easily use cut -d " " -f1,14 or something similar in perl to get the columns if awk isn't available.

Improve this answer
Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

On some devices, you can also get at the schedstat counters (/proc/<pid>/schedstat and /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/schedstat). The three fields are: time spent on the CPU; time spent waiting on a runqueue; # of timeslices run on the CPU. Some OEMs don't enable this feature in the kernel though.
3

Try this:

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less %CPU PID USER COMMAND 9.0 2721 user bash 1.4 956 root ... 0.5 2212 user ...

EDIT:

You can use adb shell and busybox (http://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html)

adb shell busybox top 

c:\ adb push busybox /system/bin c:\ adb shell # busybox top CPU: 2.3% usr 3.1% sys 3.9% nic 90.5% idle 0.0% io 0.0% irq 0.0% sirq Load average: 1.06 1.66 10.63 1/589 8048 ←[7m PID PPID USER STAT VSZ %MEM CPU %CPU COMMAND←[0m 31619 2180 10112 S 217m 67.0 0 3.8 com.mgeek.android.DolphinBrowser.B 2232 2180 1000 S 551m169.6 0 2.6 system_server 8038 8037 0 R 2068 0.6 0 0.8 busybox top 2178 1 0 S 11092 3.3 0 0.6 /system/bin/drexe 6812 2180 10104 S 199m 61.2 0 0.5 android.tether 2291 2180 1001 S 324m 99.8 0 0.3 com.android.phone 2308 2180 10006 S 325m100.0 0 0.1 com.sec.android.app.dialertab 2177 1 1001 S 9624 2.8 0 0.1 /system/bin/rild 5 2 0 SW< 0 0.0 0 0.1 [events/0] 30087 2180 10022 S 358m110.4 0 0.0 com.samsung.vvm 2304 2180 10006 S 311m 96.0 0 0.0 com.sec.android.app.twlauncher 16110 2180 10006 S 296m 91.3 0 0.0 android.process.acore 2445 2180 10006 S 272m 83.8 0 0.0 com.sec.android.provider.logsprovi 8064 2180 10002 S 238m 73.4 0 0.0 com.google.process.gapps 31537 2180 10037 S 227m 69.9 0 0.0 com.google.android.gm 2288 2180 10048 S 221m 68.1 0 0.0 com.swype.android.inputmethod 2285 2180 10013 S 215m 66.3 0 0.0 com.tat.livewallpaper.aurora 30664 2180 10011 S 213m 65.8 0 0.0 com.android.email 31191 2180 10099 S 209m 64.4 0 0.0 com.sirma.mobile.bible.android 2377 2180 10087 S 207m 63.9 0 0.0 android.tts

(Taken from here)

Improve this answer

2 Comments

Have you tried this on Android, or a generic Linux? My JellyBean tablet ignores these parameters
Cool. Should have added: "in an unrooted device"
2

Got this information from another thread:

3) Getting CPU info

~$ adb shell dumpsys cpuinfo

Output:

Load: 0.08 / 0.4 / 0.64 CPU usage from 42816ms to 34683ms ago: system_server: 1% = 1% user + 0% kernel / faults: 16 minor kdebuglog.sh: 0% = 0% user + 0% kernel / faults: 160 minor tiwlan_wq: 0% = 0% user + 0% kernel usb_mass_storag: 0% = 0% user + 0% kernel pvr_workqueue: 0% = 0% user + 0% kernel +sleep: 0% = 0% user + 0% kernel +sleep: 0% = 0% user + 0% kernel TOTAL: 6% = 1% user + 3% kernel + 0% irq

EDIT:

You can also try this command: echo $(adb shell ps | grep com.android.phone | awk '{ system("adb shell cat /proc/" $2 "/stat");}' | awk '{print $14+$15;}')

Also:

using top : This will show you the cpu stats top -b -n 1 |grep ^Cpu

using ps: This will show you the % cpu usage for each process. ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less

EDIT2:

In realtion to your comments and the bounty description (How can I guess which thread eats the battery?) I found an interesting page:

http://ziyang.eecs.umich.edu/projects/powertutor/

As stated there:

You can use PowerTutor to monitor the power consumption of any application.

Try this for an instance and see if it meets your requirements.

FINAL EDIT:

Check out the Systrace documentation on the developer.android.com site:

http://developer.android.com/tools/debugging/systrace.html http://developer.android.com/tools/help/systrace.html

I'm sorry if you already tried that, but that's one concrete method to measure the performance.

Improve this answer

4 Comments

As I explained in the bounty description, higher precisionCPU usage is interesting when used together with -t parameter, to help find the thrrads that are not idle enough.
BTW, ps on my devices does not support -eo.
re: PowerTutor - it does not provide per-thread resolution. But it definitely gives a lot of useful information, e.g. Wi-Fi or display power consumption per application.
re: systrace. I am glad you mentioned it here, because we should be reminded again and again about the powerful profiling tools available for Android JVM. Unfortunately, it does not provide information on native pthreads.
-2

Use DDMS and method profiling to get a TraceView.

Basically:

  1. Launch your app in debug mode
  2. In DDMS, in the Devices tab, click "Start method profiling"
  3. Do stuff on your device to recreate the conditions you want to monitor
  4. Click "Stop method profiling"
  5. You'll get a fairly detailed graph with each thread's execution that you can drill down into

More details here: http://developer.android.com/tools/debugging/debugging-tracing.html

Disclaimer: I've only done this with a simple test app so I don't know how much mileage you'll get out of it. It does seem to give a bit more precision than what has been described so far, and does not require root.

enter image description here

Improve this answer

1 Comment

The approach you published here is definitely useful in many cases, and we should be reminded again and again about the powerful profiling tools available for Android JVM. Unfortunately, this does not answer the question, because the stumbling block is the native threads activity - which is not covered by TraceView.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.