itop – Interrupts ‘top-like’ utility for Linux

On a 24-core Linux machine I wanted to monitor interrupts/sec. The reason is quite complicated, let’s say that there are more than 100.000 interrupts/sec and I want to monitor who needs what.

First I installed Debian’s itop package. It didn’t work at all on the 24-core machine, just showed an empty display. Then I tried a perl itop implementation I found online at a redhat server, let’s call it redhat’s itop. That still didn’t work well. Lot’s of parsing issues and it certainly wasn’t ready to deal with 24-cores.

So I tweaked it a bit and made it ready for a 24-core server. You can find it online at my github repository: kargig’s itop

Since displaying 24 columns of continuously changing numbers doesn’t fit all screens, I added some command line options to the tool.
By default it shows all interrupts/sec per CPU if the number of CPU cores is not higher than 8. If it’s higher than 8 it just displays the total (adding all per core numbers) interrupts/sec.
Command line flag ‘-a’ forces displaying of ALL cores and command line flag ‘-t’ forces displaying just the TOTAL number of interrupts/sec.

So if you too need to monitor your server’s interrupts/sec, give my itop a try. If you want to make changes, just fork it on github. Simple as that…I promise to merge any interesting changes/pull requests you people send me!

oh and here’s a screenshot of ‘itop -t’