From: Alex Young <alex@...>
Date: 2007-01-06T20:41:54+09:00
Subject: /proc/PID/stat documentation?

Not strictly a Ruby question, but I figure someone around here will know 
the answer...

I'm using the sys-proctable gem to gather process load information on a 
Debian machine (kernel 2.6.15 if it's relevant), because I'm trying to 
do some load-balancing between machines and processes on those machines. 
  However, I can't seem to find any documentation on what the numbers 
returned actually represent - specifically, the units of the utime, 
stime, cutime and cstime fields, and precisely what they represent.

The numbers are lifted straight from /proc/PID/stat, so any 
documentation on that would be handy.  I've checked the documentation in 
the kernel source tree, but it was singularly unenlightening - unless I 
missed something.

For example:

-- konsole_ps.rb --

require 'proctable'
require 'yaml'
konsole = Sys::ProcTable.ps.find{|p| p.name == 'konsole'}
y({'utime' => konsole.utime, 'stime' => konsole.stime, 'cutime' => 
konsole.cutime, 'cstime' => konsole.cstime})

-- output --
---
cutime: 0
utime: 82
stime: 9
cstime: 0

I don't understand what the numbers that come out represent, and I can't 
really tie them up with what comes out of `ps`.  Can anyone point me in 
the right direction?

-- 
Alex