cpu widget - ps (average historical values) vs top (current values)

[qpkorr]

Not sure if anyone else is likely to agree, but just in case... I was surprised that the cpu figures for specific processes didn't seem to match those from "top" at all. Digging deeper, it seems the cpu widgets gets per-process values from ps. According to respective man pages, for ps: "CPU usage is currently expressed as the percentage of time spent running during the entire lifetime of a process. This is not ideal, and it does not conform to the standards that ps otherwise conforms to." For top, the figure relates not to average but to current CPU usage: "The task's share of the elapsed CPU time since the last screen update, expressed as a percentage of total CPU time." Current values are far more interesting to me - code for them, using top and awk, is here: https://github.com/qpkorr/awesome-wm-widgets/commit/0ad1359de6b10dc5dc584702804a026b2dcaa592

[streetturtle]

Thanks for this information! I was wondering the same, but didn't investigate much. I think it could be useful to define a parameter for this option, so that user can choose which values to show. I'll add it and will post here when it's done.

[qpkorr]

Great! Thanks so much for the excellent widgets! Given the cpu graphs above the per process values are current, host historical averages, I'd encourage defaulting to 'top' values - but keeping both for backwards compatibility sounds good too. I wasn't sure if awk was standard enough but couldn't easily do what I needed to do with head/tail/cut - and at least calling awk is just one process, not three. Anyway - thanks again!

[qpkorr]

FYI - my code in the mentioned commit was less than ideal for processes like [foo/bar] - it was trying to 'drop the path' and converting that to just /bar] - but the start was not a path. I've updated in my fork. I hit one more issue - that sometimes the Name entries were a little bit too wide I think, and were causing some kind of line wrapping - I think - which was moving the bottom of the popup down (and making it hard to close the popup again by clicking on the widget). I made the popup a little wider - but couldn't get it looking quite right. I was struggling to close it though on a laptop, so I'm happy with the change unless you can do it better. Another alternative - would it be reasonable to close the popup by clicking anywhere within it (except the kill buttons, obviously)?

On an unrelated note - thanks for adding the net-widget! I was disappointed to not find one when I first found your repo. One request - my laptop sometimes connects via wifi, and sometimes via ethernet - is the final version of your widget likely to support aggregated network figures, if no interface is specified?

[streetturtle]

Thanks for the feedback, I also noticed the name entry issue, didin't have much time to check yet. But for the unrelated note, which is a good idea, btw - just pushed the change (https://github.com/streetturtle/awesome-wm-widgets/commit/bf6c45fb3a96baf8a39cabdf460f200b82a9de89) to get the speed from all intefaces by default. Please check if it works as expected.

[qpkorr]

Ha - we might well have been coding the second issue at the same time :) I chose a different route though, via the command line (I'd say yours is better) - except - I figured the "lo" interface (loopback, I presume?) should be omitted. Perhaps you could adopt the bash extglob from my solution?

    if interface == nil then
        watch([[bash -O extglob -c "cat /sys/class/net/!(lo)/statistics/*_bytes | awk 'NR%2{rx+=\$1}!(NR%2){tx+=\$1}END{print rx;print tx}'"]], 1, update_widget, net_speed_widget)
    else
        watch(string.format([[bash -c "cat /sys/class/net/%s/statistics/*_bytes"]], interface), 1, update_widget, net_speed_widget)
    end