Silviu-Marius Ardelean's blog

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 (880 downloads)
Download: psa for Ubuntu Linux x86 (531 downloads)
Download: psa.exe for Windows x64 (510 downloads)
Download: psa.exe for Win32 (518 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.

Sample – Google Chrome processes in Process Hacker tool

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

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.

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 it’s name.

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, in a similar way there is in Windows with tree.exe tool or on Linux in pstree or even htop.

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:

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

Redirect output to a file

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

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.

This is the story of my first experiences with Raspberry PI 2 card computer. Back in March, I bought a new toy, a Raspberry PI 2. I have downloaded the Raspbian OS ISO image, wrote it on the microSD card and the toy was up and running. 

As most probably you already know, the default package manager tool for Debian Linux derived distribution is apt-get. The apt-get command line tool that allows handling packages for new applications installation, updates, uninstall etc. The existence of this tool is one important thing that convinced me to use Linux Mint and Ubuntu instead of Red Hat fork distributions. The Raspbian OS is, also a Debian derived distribution, special design for small card-computer devices such Raspberry PI 2.

As you know the static IP address assignation facilitates easier access to any device (ex. via the SSH protocol) and I prefer to use it. I assigned a fix IP address to my Raspberry device into my router and in addition, I set the network setting to the proper static IP address (editing /etc/network/interfaces).

After a device reboot, I started the first update check via apt-get. Having a long experience with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, I had the surprise of getting errors in the moment of “apt-get update” execution.

apt-get cache cleaning provided no improvements. The ping to an explicit IP from Internet was getting an answer but not for domains, so the DNS was not acting as expected. Usually, the DNS settings modification is not needed in case we are using a DHCP server.
I preferred to use the Google’s DNS public DNS service by editing the /etc/resolv.conf file.

But even if I was logged with the root privileges each time I tried to save the /etc/resolv.conf I got “No space left on device” error message. I was surprised to realize that the disk was “100% full” and my microSD card size was less than a half I know (8GB).

In order to repair such disk space situations, we have to run the raspi-config application, where we have to select the first option Expand Filelsystem.

In case you get an error (i got twice), please insist on this option until you’ll get the message “Root partition has been resized“.
After the root partition has been recovered, the proper disk space was displayed. That allowed me the manual define the DNS settings I mentioned earlier within /etc/resolv.conf file.
Off-course you need to restart the network settings. In case you’re connected like me via SSH reboot the toy (sudo reboot). Tring to restart the networking daemon (pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart) might make the device unavailable into the network.

With these “improvements” the apt-get application was running perfect with the static IP address and I was able to install whatever official packages I needed.

References:
Raspberry Pi Static IP Address
Raspberry Pi’s “No space left on device” error message