Easily Monitor CPU Utilization in Linux Terminal With Stress Terminal UI

Brief: Monitoring CPU utilization in Linux becomes a bit better with Stress Terminal UI.

For us terminal lovers, more the terminal tools the better. I’ve covered a number of terminal tools before, including music player, file browser etc. And today, I’m here with a monitoring tool that can visualize various parameters of your CPU inside your terminal.

I know that we have covered CoreFreq CPU Utilization tool in the past but that tool was meant for advanced users. Stress Terminal UI is a relatively a lot easier to use and comprehend.

Stress Terminal UI for CPU monitoring in Linux

Stress Terminal UI (or in short, s-tui) is CPU monitoring tool that runs entirely within your terminal. It is written in Python and developed by Alex Manuskin. Let’s take a look first:

It has a visually pleasant and clean interface. If you want a smooth graph plotting, you can check the relevant options.

Features

Stress Terminal UI offers the following features:

• Visualize CPU Frequency, Utilization, Temperature & Power Usage
• Displays performance dips caused by thermal throttling
• Lightweight & uses minimal resources
• Requires no display server (i.e. X-server for most Linux distros)
• Stress Operation mode for stress testing the CPU

You can hide specific sections if you don’t need them. Here’s how it looks with smooth graph plotting and only Frequency & Power Usage sections enabled:

s-tui also supports stress testing your CPU. It uses the stress command-line tool in the background for stressing the CPU. If you select the Stress Operation mode, you will notice that all the graphs will hit their max values:

You can also tweak the stress testing parameters from the Stress Options:

s-tui also displays the CPU information in textual form in the bottom:

If you want to observe various CPU parameters of you computer Stress Terminal UI is a really nice tool. Specially it will be helpful if you want to monitor your remote systems or VPS.

However, s-tui doesn’t show specific information about the processes running on the system, it just visualizes the overall situation. So, if you want a tool that reports information about individual processes or want to manage those processes, s-tui can’t really help you with that.

Installation on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions

For installing s-tui, you will need a Python environment set up on your system and the pip command has to be available.

Now, run the following command for installing it:

pip install s-tui --user

If you want to install it system-wide, you will have to run pip with sudo:

sudo pip install s-tui

That is enough for installing s-tui.

But if you want to use the Stress Operation mode, you will also have to install stress on your system. It’s just a simple apt command away:

sudo apt install stress

Now, you are up and ready for using s-tui on your system. If you find any bug you can report it in the s-tui’s Github Issues page.

What do you think about s-tui? Is it something you would use for CPU monitoring in Linux? Do you use some other tool to monitor CPU utilization?

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