Performance Monitoring - netdata

AndrewH

I've seen quite a few threads about retropie performance and temperature, and I wanted to share this in the hopes it's useful;

Netdata is a very lightweight real-time performance monitoring tool. While its main use appears to be for server monitoring, there's also a section in the documentation where they talk about how it can be tailored to lower-power IOT devices (including Raspberry Pi) - in fact the big reason why I even installed it in the first place was because I wanted to monitor the operating temperature of the Pi3 in my bartop.

It's got a lot of documentation in the wiki, but it's still very easy to get started with.
Here's the installation guide
And here's how to set it up for IOT devices
(it's possible to disable a lot of the plugins to further save resources, you can also throttle the update frequency, disable logs, and also disable writes to memory)

Another great feature is that it presents its dashboards via a web interface, so you can (for example) play a game, and have real-time indication of how much CPU is being used, and what temperature is being reached.

The only (minor) downside I've found is that it will take your Pi a little longer to shut down after selecting "Shutdown System" in the ES menu - maybe an extra 30 seconds or so.

jonnykesh

@andrewh Seems like a handy tool but overkill. I just run a simple shell script via ssh on another device to monitor the temperature. It would be very easily adjusted to include other info such as memory use, cpu frequency etc.

AndrewH

I'm not entirely sure I'd agree.

Installation is very straightforward, and resource usage is quite low - particularly when tuned for IOT devices.

And a big advantage is that it logs data over time, so it's possible to review the previous couple of minutes to an hour in order to get visibility of transient spikes.
So, I can play a game, give the game full attention, and then afterwards see what the peak temperature or peak CPU usage reached was.
With no disrespect towards your script, there's the danger that adding too much more to it would potentially have more of an impact on performance than netdata would.

Anyway, I think it's fair to say that there are many ways to do things - your script is definitely the best fit for some use cases, and it's possible that netdata is for some others.

AndrewH

@jonnykesh - do you have that shell script shared anywhere? Why not add it to this thread, as another available option for anyone interested in trying it out...

jonnykesh

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
clear
BYELL=`echo "\033[01;33m"` #boldyellow
ORNG=`echo "\033[33m"`     #orange
WHITE=`echo "\033[01;37m"` #bold white
RED=`echo "\033[31m"`      #red
RESET=`echo "\033[m"`      #reset

temp=$(vcgencmd measure_temp)
temp=${temp:5:4}

echo -e "${RESET}${ORNG}Device:${BYELL}`whoami`@`uname -n`${WHITE}                              `date +"%a %d %b %Y %R %Z"`${RESET}${ORNG}                              IP:${BYELL}`ip route get 8.8.8.8 2>/dev/null | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f8`${RESET}"
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo -e "                                                 ${ORNG}************************"
echo -e "                                                 [${BYELL}   CPU Temp: ${temp}°C${RESET}${ORNG}   ]"
echo -e "                                                 ${ORNG}************************${RESET}"
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo -e "                                        ${BYELL}CPU temperature is updated every 5 seconds.${RESET}"
echo
echo -e "                                                   ${ORNG}Press Ctrl+C to exit."${RESET}
tput cuf 118
sleep 5;
clear
done