💻 sysmonitor

A simple, real-time system monitor for Linux. It watches your CPU and RAM usage and turns that data into a live graph.

What does it do?

• Live Stats: Shows how hard each of your CPU cores is working.
• Memory Tracking: Keeps an eye on your RAM usage.
• Logging: Saves all your data to a log.csv file so you can look at it later.
• Real-time Graphing: Draws a live-updating plot of your resource usage using Matplotlib.

How to get it running

1. Set up your environment: Make sure you have your virtual environment active.
2. Install dependencies:

pip install pandas matplotlib

3. Run the monitor:

python main.py

Project Files

• main.py: The heart of the app. It runs the loop that refreshes the display.
• data.py: The "engine" that reads raw data from the Linux system.
• log.py: Handles saving data to a CSV file.
• plot.py: Handles the live-updating graph window.

How it works

1. The /proc Pseudo-Filesystem

The code doesn't ask the OS for stats through a standard API; it reads them from the procfs (/proc). In Linux, the kernel exposes internal data as if they were regular files.

• CPU: I'm reading /proc/stat. The kernel provides a running total of "jiffies" (clock ticks) the CPU has spent in various states.
• The Delta Logic: Because /proc/stat provides cumulative totals since boot, a single read is useless for calculating current usage. Your get_cpu_usage() function is clever: it stores PREV_CPU_STATS, waits 2 seconds, reads again, and calculates the difference (the delta).

2. The CPU Usage Formula

Using the standard calculation for CPU utilization:

Total Time = Σ (all fields in /proc/stat)

Idle Time = idle + iowait

Usage % = (Total Time − Idle Time) / Total Time × 100

3. RAM Logic

I'm pulling from /proc/meminfo. It’s worth noting that I used MemAvailable instead of MemFree. MemFree only shows totally untouched memory, while MemAvailable accounts for memory that is technically used by the cache but can be instantly reclaimed if needed.