CGFreak control group visualizer

CGFreak control group visualizer

[Linus Walleij]

A while back I started to write CGFreak to visualize the intricacies of control
groups using some python and cairo. (Nothing special, just a hobby - famous
last words.) I have a web page of it running with some explanations of what
you see here:

  http://cgfreak.sourceforge.net/

The basic idea is that resources can often be represented in piecharts,
everyone should be familiar with these from school and economists love
them. So I visualize system resources in control groups as piecharts and
now I have also started to make it a bit interactive. It all grew out of the
educational need to understand scheduling and control groups.

I don't know if you think this is as fun as I think, it's nice images anyway,
I don't know how accurate they are, feedback and patches welcome.

Linus Walleij

Re: CGFreak control group visualizer

[Balbir Singh]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 2:36 AM, Linus Walleij
<linus.ml.walleij@gmail.com> wrote:
> A while back I started to write CGFreak to visualize the intricacies of control
> groups using some python and cairo. (Nothing special, just a hobby - famous
> last words.) I have a web page of it running with some explanations of what
> you see here:
>
>  http://cgfreak.sourceforge.net/
>
> The basic idea is that resources can often be represented in piecharts,
> everyone should be familiar with these from school and economists love
> them. So I visualize system resources in control groups as piecharts and
> now I have also started to make it a bit interactive. It all grew out of the
> educational need to understand scheduling and control groups.
>
> I don't know if you think this is as fun as I think, it's nice images anyway,
> I don't know how accurate they are, feedback and patches welcome.

I looked at the screenshots and they look very interesting. Would it
take a lot of effort to extend it to track other controllers like
memory, network, etc?

Balbir Singh.

Re: CGFreak control group visualizer

[Linus Walleij]

2009/10/7 Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>:

> I looked at the screenshots and they look very interesting. Would it
> take a lot of effort to extend it to track other controllers like
> memory, network, etc?

No I don't think that'd be a problem if you can just come up with some
proper visualization idea.

Memory can probably be a piechart as well, representing the physical memory
(I think Matt already has some support for offline-generation of such charts in
smem but this could be interactive, on-the-fly.)

Network bandwidth is harder I think because I don't know how these interfaces
look if you want to measure throughput also (alottment would be easy to draw
as a pie chart).

Patches welcome :-)

Linus Walleij

Re: CGFreak control group visualizer

[Balbir Singh]

* Linus Walleij <linus.ml.walleij@gmail.com> [2009-10-07 13:03:30]:

> 2009/10/7 Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>:
> 
> > I looked at the screenshots and they look very interesting. Would it
> > take a lot of effort to extend it to track other controllers like
> > memory, network, etc?
> 
> No I don't think that'd be a problem if you can just come up with some
> proper visualization idea.
> 
> Memory can probably be a piechart as well, representing the physical memory
> (I think Matt already has some support for offline-generation of such charts in
> smem but this could be interactive, on-the-fly.)
>

Yeah.. that is a challenge, I tried running the visulation and it
seems to be quite heavy on the CPU and in my case with several
hundreds of process and several threads per process, the output
stopped making sense at some point. I'll play a bit more with it.
 
> Network bandwidth is harder I think because I don't know how these interfaces
> look if you want to measure throughput also (alottment would be easy to draw
> as a pie chart).
> 
> Patches welcome :-)a

:)

> 
> Linus Walleij

-- 
	Balbir