System and Process Monitoring in Java

Java provides very limited interaction with other system processes, which makes it very difficult to implement benchmarking and system monitoring utilities. This little project attempts to provide a simple Java API to monitor all system processes with a help of JNI (Java Native Interface).

Here are sample snapshots on how a demo application looks like in Linux and Windows:

This is not the way to benchmark programs when recording data for scientific purposes (method is not precise as e.g. memtime and has rather big overhead of Java), but should be sufficient for most desktop uses especially if you have Java frontend. You may want to try it too:

• sysmon.jar sample implementation for system and process monitoring in Java (all sources included). Currently only Linux and Windows support is implemented. JNI aspect is totally hidden, you just need this one little jar library and you can run it right away.
• javadoc of sysmon.jar classes.
• cpumemhog for Linux and for Windows: CPU and memory hungry program to try on, alternatively you may want to try on Uppaal verifyta process instead.

Known limitations:

• Java API uses integer PIDs (process identifiers). This is not very portable, but can be easily changed if needed.
• If process is created via Runtime.exec() method, then there is no sure way of getting PID for that process. One must guess by name, creation date or use some other means to discover PID (e.g. communicate to that process via standard I/O).

The source code was developed from scratch (i.e. I am the author). The source and Makefile script is included in the JAR archive, use under GPL-2.0 license.

Feedback is very much welcome.

Marius Mikučionis marius@cs.aau.dk