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Process Status Analysis – the first steps

psa.exe partial tree sample

I am pleased to announce my first cross-platform and open source project, the Process Status Analysis tool, available on GitHub.

The Process Status Analysis (psa) version 0.2 is available for Windows and Linux (Debian derived / Ubuntu tested) Operating Systems.
Download: psa for Ubuntu Linux x64 (7932 downloads )
Download: psa for Ubuntu Linux x86 (7092 downloads )
Download: psa.exe for Windows x64 (6747 downloads )
Download: psa.exe for Win32 (6792 downloads )

You may wonder why I did it or what it brings new. Well, I did it for fun, in my spare time and I will continue improving it when I’ll find a time to do it.

The project is written in modern C++ using idioms from the C++ 1x standards. Even if initially was done as a C++ for Windows only, during the past days I managed the port of it for Linux using Visual Studio 2017’s project templates and a connection via SSH.
In general, the source code base is similar, differing just by OS specific stuff.

In case you want to find out more about how to develop C++ Linux projects from the best development tool (imho), Visual Studio, you can find more information on Visual Studio development team blog.

Related to this psa project, the Linux version requires libprocps4-dev library in order to build.

The main reason for starting this project was that I wanted to know what’s the total memory amount used by my Chrome browser. I know it uses a lot of resources, but not that much… 🙂

Even if my preferred processes analysis tool, the Process Hacker offers a lot of processes administration possibilities, but it didn’t provide what I want, so I decided to enjoy a bit.

Chrome processes in Process Hacker
Sample – Google Chrome processes in Process Hacker tool

So, what I achieved by psa.exe was something like:

C:\Windows\system32> psa -o chrome
PID [896] chrome.exe 237.5234 MB
PID [1496] chrome.exe 87.6875 MB
PID [2388] chrome.exe 166.5000 MB
PID [5860] chrome.exe 3.1211 MB
PID [7336] chrome.exe 273.2188 MB
PID [8444] chrome.exe 68.0508 MB
PID [8624] chrome.exe 63.3945 MB
PID [9180] chrome.exe 296.9766 MB
PID [10600] chrome.exe 292.6289 MB
PID [12352] chrome.exe 182.5977 MB
PID [13688] chrome.exe 2.3555 MB
PID [14052] chrome.exe 73.1875 MB
PID [16200] chrome.exe 211.9805 MB
PID [17284] chrome.exe 55.7148 MB
PID [18036] chrome.exe 208.6680 MB
PID [19012] chrome.exe 457.2305 MB
PID [19312] chrome.exe 143.4766 MB
-----------------------------------
Total used memory: 2824.31 MB

A bit too much in my humble opinion…
The features this tool offers includes:

Get all processes loaded in memory information

I case you want to have a snapshot of all the processes loaded in the OS’s memory you can have it with.

psa -a

Get process only used memory

With psa.exe you can reach the used memory by a specific parameter -o after the process name or at least a part of its name.

psa -o chrome             // find how much memory uses your Chrome!   o_O

Currently, there is no string replace ‘*’ but it’s ongoing.


Print processes tree

Storing the processes’ data within a generic tree done by me, I took the decision to print the processes’ tree output, similarly there is in Windows with tree.exe tool or on Linux in pstree or even htop.

./psa -t
./psa -t 1034

psa.exe partial tree sample
Process Status Analysis partial tree of Windows process

Top most “expensive” processes

In case you want to see what are the most expensive processes within your operating system, you can achieve it with:

psa -e 20

or simpler psa -e in case you’re sure you want top 10 expensive processes (the default value).

silviu@ubuntu-dev-server:~/projects/psa-lin/bin/x64/Release$ ./psa -e
Top 10 consuming memory processes
-------------------------------------------
PID        Process Name         RAM Usage
-------------------------------------------
[924]    /usr/lib/policykit-1/polkitd   270.68 MB
[906]    /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon       269.43 MB
[842]    /usr/sbin/rsyslogd     250.39 MB
[878]    /usr/lib/snapd/snapd   197.29 MB
[531]    /lib/systemd/systemd-timesyncd         97.97 MB
[1614]    sshd: silviu@pts/0    93.16 MB
[1576]    sshd: silviu [priv]   93.16 MB
[863]    /usr/bin/lxcfs         93.13 MB
[427]    /sbin/lvmetad          92.55 MB
[1034]    /usr/sbin/sshd        63.98 MB
-------------------------------------------


C:\Windows\system32> psa -e 10
Top 10 consuming memory processes
-------------------------------------------
PID        Process Name         RAM Usage
-------------------------------------------
[19012]    chrome.exe           435.67 MB
[17684]    chrome.exe           329.51 MB
[7336]    chrome.exe            259.61 MB
[15576]    devenv.exe           248.20 MB
[896]    chrome.exe             222.85 MB
[2388]    chrome.exe            188.21 MB
[18428]    chrome.exe           184.48 MB
[15760]    chrome.exe           173.82 MB
[488]    Dropbox.exe            162.15 MB
[5488]    googledrivesync.exe   161.11 MB
-------------------------------------------
Total used memory: 2365.61 MB

Redirect output to a file

From the standard output the information can be easily redirected to a file.

c:\> psa -t > windows_processes_tree.txt
# ./psa -t > linux_processes_tree.txt        

Kill process feature

This feature was not implemented yet but in case we need it we can be done it easily with the existing tools on the target OS (ex. Task Manager, Process Exporer/Hacker, pskill.exe for Windows or the combination ps + kill on LInux).

Feedbacks and improvements
Any constructive feedback, suggestions, contributions to improvements are appreciated.
Feel free to add any issue you find, wish or suggestion you have in the GitHub repository, the 
Issues section or here as a comment.

Silviu Ardelean

Software Engineer

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