CPU Usage Tracker

A multithreaded per-core CPU usage monitor for Linux that reads statistics directly from /proc/stat and displays real-time utilization percentages. The program uses a producer-consumer architecture with five dedicated threads, mutex-protected shared data structures, an asynchronous logger writing to cut.log, and a watchdog system for thread health monitoring.

Features

• Producer-consumer pipeline with 5 dedicated threads: reader, analyzer, printer, logger, and watchdog
• Real-time monitoring of individual CPU core utilization from /proc/stat
• Ring buffer queue for CPU statistics with configurable depth (default: 5 snapshots)
• Mutex synchronization for thread-safe access to shared data structures
• Watchdog thread with heartbeat tracking — detects crashes within 2 seconds and triggers graceful shutdown
• Asynchronous logger — flushes events from a 50-entry message queue to cut.log
• Graceful shutdown via SIGTERM signal handling with proper thread detachment and cleanup
• Dynamic core detection — automatically adapts to the number of CPU cores
• Unit tests for core calculation functions
• Zero memory leaks verified with Valgrind (86 allocs, 86 frees)

Technical Details

• Language: C with POSIX pthreads
• Build system: Makefile with gcc
• Thread architecture: Reader (200 ms) parses /proc/stat, Analyzer (200 ms) computes percentages, Printer (1 s) formats output, Logger (200 ms) flushes cut.log, Watchdog (200 ms) monitors heartbeats
• Synchronization: Mutex-protected shared queues between pipeline stages
• Signal handling: SIGTERM triggers clean thread shutdown and resource deallocation

Build Instructions

git clone https://github.com/ArturKos/cpu_usage_tracker.git
cd cpu_usage_tracker
make

Tested Platforms

• Ubuntu (Intel i5, Intel i7)
• Linux Mint (Intel i5)
• Lubuntu (Intel Atom N550)
• Raspbian (Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB RAM)
• Fedora (KVM Virtual Machine)
• Debian (KVM Virtual Machine)

Check out the project on GitHub: CPU Usage Tracker on GitHub

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