Blog posts for tags/windows

  1. System load average on Windows in Python

    New psutil 5.6.2 release implements an emulation of os.getloadavg() on Windows which was kindly contributed by Ammar Askar who originally implemented it for cPython's test suite. This idea has been floating around for quite a while. The first proposal dates back to 2010, when psutil was still hosted on Google Code, and it popped up multiple times throughout the years. There was/is a bunch of info on internet mentioning the bits with which it's theoretically possible to do this (the so called System Processor Queue Length), but I couldn't find any real implementation. A Google search tells there is quite some demand for this, but very few tools out there providing this natively (the only one I could find is this sFlowTrend tool and Zabbix), so I'm very happy this finally landed into psutil / Python.

    Other improvements and bugfixes in psutil 5.6.2

    The full list is here but I would like to mention a couple:

    • 1476: the possibility to set process' high I/O priority on Windows
    • 1458: colorized test output. I admit nobody will use this directly but it's very cool and I'm porting it to a bunch of other projects I work on (e.g. pyftpdlib). Also, perhaps this could be a good candidate for a small module to put on PYPI which can also include some functionalities taken from pytest and which I'm gradually re-implementing in unittest module amongst which:
      • 1478: re-running failed tests
      • display test timings/durations: this is something I'm contributing to cPython, see BPO-4080 and and PR-12271

    About me

    I'm currently in China (Shenzhen) for a mix of vacation and work, and I will likely take a break from Open Source for a while (likely 2.5 months, during which I will also go to Philippines and Japan - I love Asia ;-)).

    External

  2. psutil 4.2.0: Windows services in Python

    New psutil 4.2.0 is out. The main feature of this release is the support for Windows services:

    >>> import psutil
    >>> list(psutil.win_service_iter())
    [<WindowsService(name='AeLookupSvc', display_name='Application Experience') at 38850096>,
     <WindowsService(name='ALG', display_name='Application Layer Gateway Service') at 38850128>,
     <WindowsService(name='APNMCP', display_name='Ask Update Service') at 38850160>,
     <WindowsService(name='AppIDSvc', display_name='Application Identity') at 38850192>,
     ...]
    >>> s = psutil.win_service_get('alg')
    >>> s.as_dict()
    {'binpath': 'C:\\Windows\\System32\\alg.exe',
     'description': 'Provides support for 3rd party protocol plug-ins for Internet Connection Sharing',
     'display_name': 'Application Layer Gateway Service',
     'name': 'alg',
     'pid': None,
     'start_type': 'manual',
     'status': 'stopped',
     'username': 'NT AUTHORITY\\LocalService'}
    

    I did this mainly because I find pywin32 APIs too low level. Having something like this in psutil can be useful to discover and monitor services more easily. The code changes are here and here's the doc. The API for querying a service is similar to psutil.Process. You can get a reference to a service object by using its name (which is unique for every service) and then use name(), status(), etc..:

    >>> s = psutil.win_service_get('alg')
    >>> s.name()
    'alg'
    >>> s.status()
    'stopped'
    

    Initially I thought to expose and provide a complete set of APIs to handle all aspects of service handling including start(), stop(), restart(), install(), uninstall() and modify() but I soon realized that I would have ended up reimplementing what pywin32 already provides at the cost of overcrowding psutil API (see my reasoning here). I think psutil should really be about monitoring, not about installing and modifying system stuff, especially something as critical as a Windows service.

    Considerations about Windows services

    For those of you who are not familiar with Windows, a service is something, generally an executable (.exe), which runs at system startup and keeps running in background. We can say they are the equivalent of a UNIX init script. All service are controlled by a "manager" which keeps track of their status and metadata (e.g. description, startup type) and with that you can start and stop them. It is interesting to note that since (most) services are bound to an executable (and hence a process) you can reference the process via its PID:

    >>> s = psutil.win_service_get('sshd')
    >>> s
    <WindowsService(name='sshd', display_name='Open SSH server') at 38853046>
    >>> s.pid()
    1865
    >>> p = psutil.Process(1865)
    >>> p
    <psutil.Process(pid=19547, name='sshd.exe') at 140461487781328>
    >>> p.exe()
    'C:\CygWin\bin\sshd'
    

    Other improvements

    psutil 4.2.0 comes with 2 other enhancements for Linux:

    • psutil.virtual_memory() returns a new "shared" memory field. This is the same value reported by free cmdline utility.
    • I changed the way how /proc was parsed. Instead of reading /proc/{pid}/status line by line I used a regular expression. Here's the speedups:
      • Process.ppid() is 20% faster
      • Process.status() is 28% faster
      • Process.name() is 25% faster
      • Process.num_threads() is 20% faster (on Python 3 only; on Python 2 it's a bit slower; I suppose re module received some improvements)

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