How to get current CPU and RAM usage in Python?

Question

What's your preferred way of getting current system status (current CPU, RAM, free disk space, etc.) in Python? Bonus points for *nix and Windows platforms.

There seems to be a few possible ways of extracting that from my search:

1. Using a library such as PSI (that currently seems not actively developed and not supported on multiple platform) or something like pystatgrab (again no activity since 2007 it seems and no support for Windows).

2. Using platform specific code such as using a os.popen("ps") or similar for the *nix systems and MEMORYSTATUS in ctypes.windll.kernel32 (see this recipe on ActiveState) for the Windows platform. One could put a Python class together with all those code snippets.

It's not that those methods are bad but is there already a well-supported, multi-platform way of doing the same thing?

Answer 1

The psutil library gives you information about CPU, RAM, etc., on a variety of platforms:

psutil is a module providing an interface for retrieving information on running processes and system utilization (CPU, memory) in a portable way by using Python, implementing many functionalities offered by tools like ps, top and Windows task manager.

It currently supports Linux, Windows, OSX, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, with Python versions from 2.6 to 3.5 (users of Python 2.4 and 2.5 may use 2.1.3 version).

---

Some examples:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import psutil
# gives a single float value
psutil.cpu_percent()
# gives an object with many fields
psutil.virtual_memory()
# you can convert that object to a dictionary 
dict(psutil.virtual_memory()._asdict())
# you can have the percentage of used RAM
psutil.virtual_memory().percent
79.2
# you can calculate percentage of available memory
psutil.virtual_memory().available * 100 / psutil.virtual_memory().total
20.8

Here's other documentation that provides more concepts and interest concepts:

• https://psutil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/