Monitoring performance

Updated: April 19, 2023

The QNX System Information perspective displays realtime data about the processes running on a target machine, including CPU usage statistics. These statistics help you find processes or threads that are consuming many CPU cycles.

This perspective is a good starting point for assessing an application's impact on system responsiveness because its views let you easily compare the CPU usage of different processes. Furthermore, the data come in real time from the target (through qconn), without you having to recompile or relaunch an application.

Note: To see data from a particular target in the QNX System Information perspective, you must select that target in the Target Navigator. In all perspective views, the data are refreshed every five seconds, allowing you to closely monitor performance for the entire system or individual processes.

First, you can use the System Resources view to see the current and past computational load on the target machine. The System Summary view displays similar statistics but includes the change in CPU usage for each process. Then, you can switch to the Process Information view to examine thread-level CPU times for selected processes.

QNX Neutrino utilities for monitoring performance

The QNX Neutrino RTOS includes several utilities that monitor process performance. You can run the hogs command to list the processes hogging the CPU. The top utility provides more details about process performance, including thread states and CPU usage. Also, run pidin lets you view performance metrics for processes, such as the CPU seconds consumed by the kernel on behalf of a process or by its children.