Another "Co" tool from the CoDeeN project
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CoTop provides a top-like monitoring tool for PlanetLab. What this means is that instead of seeing processes and their properties, you see information about slices. This approach provides a means of seeing what slices are consuming resources on each node, without requiring access to information about all processes.
CoTop is intended to be very similar to the standard top. When you run it, you'll see a summary of the system at the top, followed by a number of rows. On each row, you will see the summary for one slice on the node. These rows are sorted by CPU consumption by default, but the sort key can be changed by pressing numbers in the range of '2'-'0' (all numbers except '1'). Information about slices is gathered using slicestat sensor.
Follow these steps to install CoTop on
your own slice:
CoTop is a fairly simple program to
use. When you run it via 'cotop', you will see a screen that looks
like
The top portion of the screen shows the standard measurements
reported by top. The bottom portion shows slices and their
properties. These fields are taken from slicestat, and are as
follows:
The values are updated roughly every five seconds as the program runs. By default, they are sorted in decreasing order of %CPU. However, you can change the sort order by typing numbers from '2' to '9' and '0'. The TX1 column is sort field 2, the %CPU is 9, and %MEM is 0. The value '1' is used for SMP machines.
Other useful commands are similar to top - typing 's' allows you to change the delay, and typing '#' allows you to change the number of tasks shown. Typing 'q' exits the program.
CoTop is basically a fairly quick-and-dirty hack of top from the psproc tools. It's labeled as version 0.9 beta, simply because it sounded like a good idea. The summary data shown at the top doesn't exactly match what slicestat reports, but again, this doesn't seem too bad. The other known problems are related to displaying. The screen sort of expects 80 columns, and won't fail as gracefully as top if the width is narrower. The slice data is also not really integrated into the rest of the program. If you're a power user of top who likes to configure which columns are visible, you'll find that the configuration screen has no effect on the slice data.
If something really bothers you to the point that you think others would benefit from it, drop us a line, or take a stab at the change yourself with the sources.
KyoungSoo Park and Vivek Pai, with input from lots of others. We may collectively be contacted at princeton_codeen at slices.planet-lab.org
We would like to thank Brent Chun for his slicestat sensor, which he has graciously modified to improve the interoperability with CoTop. We would also like to thank Albert Calahan for his psproc tools.