> What's the best way to get the instantaneous CPU utilization? I am
> trying to build-a-better-CPUMeter and I want a routine I can call about 4
> times per second with little CPU overhead...
Under Linux you can use the values in /proc/uptime. The first of the
numbers is the number of seconds since the system was rebooted, the second
the number of seconds idle time that were burned in the swapper process.
It should be obvious how to compute the CPU usage % from these numbers.
Or use the numbers from /proc/loadavg if they should fit your purpose
better.
It isn't really required to measure the CPU usage yourself unless you want
to port this program to non-Linux operating systems which apparently still
exist :-)
Ralf