Easily Monitor Your Raspberry Pi’s CPU Utilization with These Top Tips!

Learn how to check CPU usage on your Raspberry Pi and optimize its performance by understanding the different tools available for monitoring and managing your system resources. …

Updated October 20, 2023

Learn how to check CPU usage on your Raspberry Pi and optimize its performance by understanding the different tools available for monitoring and managing your system resources. To effectively monitor and manage the resources of a Raspberry Pi, it’s essential to keep track of its CPU usage. Here are some tips to help you do just that using various command-line tools:

Method 1: top Command

The top command is one of the most popular ways to monitor your system’s CPU usage in real-time. It displays a list of running processes and sorts them by CPU utilization, allowing you to see which programs are using the most resources. To run it, simply open a terminal window and type:

top

This will display a table with information about each process, including its PID (Process ID), user, CPU%, MEM% (memory usage), and command. Press q to exit the program.

Method 2: htop Command

If you prefer a more interactive and colorful interface, try out htop. It provides a dynamic view of your system’s resources and allows you to sort processes by various parameters like CPU usage, memory, or disk I/O. To install it, run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install htop

Then, launch htop with:

htop

Use arrow keys to navigate and press F1 for help on available keybindings. Press q to quit the program.

Method 3: uptime Command

The uptime command displays your system’s current load average, which gives an overview of CPU utilization. The three numbers represent the average CPU usage over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes:

uptime

Example output:

08:27:39 up 1 day,  4:16,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.05

A high load average can indicate that your Raspberry Pi is running out of resources and might need optimization or additional hardware.

Method 4: vmstat Command

Another useful command for checking CPU usage is vmstat. It displays statistics about system memory, CPU activity, and block I/O. Run it with:

vmstat

The output will include information about CPU utilization in the us, sy, and id columns. us shows the percentage of time spent running non-kernel code, while sy displays the percentage of time spent running kernel code. id represents the idle CPU time.

Conclusion