Is it possible to get cumulative process execution time (utime + stime)?

[cederberg]

I cannot find any way to get the execution time for a process in the current API. Had a look in the source code, and it seems the corresponding values are actually fetched for some platforms, but ignored (or not made available).

As far as I know, the proper way to fetch these values are:

• Linux — Returned by getrusage, but only for the currently running process. AFAIK, the only way to fetch the values for any process is to parse /proc/<pid>/stat, but I might be mistaken there.
• Mac — Seems to already be fetched by proc_pidinfo into a libc::proc_taskinfo struct which is used to calculate the instant CPU usage.
• Windows — Returned by GetProcessTimes in the lpKernelTime and lpUserTime fields.
• FreeBSD — Couldn't find any obvious API, perhaps same story as for Linux?

It would be great if these values were also available, as they make it possible to detect excessive CPU usage "after the fact".

[GuillaumeGomez]

Is #1044 what you're looking for?

[cederberg]

Interesting… I had missed this one. It is very similar, but I don’t think the API should return accumulated CPU use as a percentage. It is easy enough to calculate a percentage from CPU-seconds, but the inverse loses a lot of precision.

[GuillaumeGomez]

What do you think about this @bruceg? Is it possible for your feature to return both % and numbers?