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Next in our series of Python modules you should know is psutil.

Home page

• https://code.google.com/p/psutil/

Use

psutil is a module providing an interface for retrieving information on all running processes and system utilization (CPU, disk, memory, network) in a portable way by using Python, implementing many functionalities offered by command line tools such as:

• ps
• top
• df
• kill
• free
• lsof
• netstat
• ifconfig
• nice
• ionice
• iostat
• iotop
• uptime
• pidof
• tty
• who

It currently supports Linux, Windows, OSX and FreeBSD, both 32-bit and 64-bit, with Python versions from 2.4 to 3.3 by using a single code base. Pypy is also known to work.

I have used it to gather system information like CPU usage, disk usage and RAM usage.

Installation

pip install psutil

Usage

Example usage,

CPU usage

import psutil
for x in range(3):
    psutil.cpu_percent(interval=1)

Output:

4.7
5.2
5.0

RAM usage

import psutil
psutil.phymem_usage()
psutil.virtmem_usage()

Output:

usage(total=4294967296L, used=4158287872L, free=136679424L, percent=96.8)
usage(total=2147483648L, used=2045067264L, free=102416384L, percent=95.2)

Disks

Get list of partitions

import psutil
psutil.disk_partitions()

Output:

[partition(device='/dev/disk0s2', mountpoint='/', fstype='hfs')]

Disk usage

import psutil
psutil.disk_usage('/')

Output:

usage(total=499248103424, used=195677974528, free=303307984896, percent=39.2)

Network

import psutil
psutil.network_io_counters(True)

Output:

{'gif0': iostat(bytes_sent=0L, bytes_recv=0L, packets_sent=0L, packets_recv=0L),
'pflog0': iostat(bytes_sent=0L, bytes_recv=0L, packets_sent=0L, packets_recv=0L),
'en0': iostat(bytes_sent=2376067805L, bytes_recv=5789960439L, packets_sent=10769542L, packets_recv=11796673L),
'en1': iostat(bytes_sent=40665975852L, bytes_recv=40514227524L, packets_sent=62248599L, packets_recv=55179277L),
'lo0': iostat(bytes_sent=21946718L, bytes_recv=21946718L, packets_sent=104300L, packets_recv=104300L),
'p2p0': iostat(bytes_sent=0L, bytes_recv=0L, packets_sent=0L, packets_recv=0L),
'stf0': iostat(bytes_sent=0L, bytes_recv=0L, packets_sent=0L, packets_recv=0L),
'fw0': iostat(bytes_sent=346L, bytes_recv=0L, packets_sent=0L, packets_recv=0L)}

And there is more

Lots more can be done using this package, please refer to the documentation for further usage information.