Does nvidia-smi give instantaneous informations or an average on the interval?

Question

When i use nvidia-smi -l 60 for example, i was asking to myself if :

• the information given is a snapshot at the time it's used each 60 seconds
• the information given is the average between the time and the time +/- 60 seconds

Do you know the answer ? i couldn't find it yet.

Thank you.

Answer 1

The -l options performs polling on nvidia-smi every given seconds (-lms if you want to perform every given milliseconds). So basically yes it's a snapshot every given amount of time.

Actually if you just want to monitor it, you could do the same with the watch utility (which is the standard way of polling on a shell script). This will display the nvidia-smi output and update it every 1 second: watch -n 1 nvidia-smi

If you want to redirect it to some file (and eventually filter it if you are interested in some specific metric) you could also build a short shell script to do that such as:

while true; do nvidia-smi | tee -a logfile && sleep 2; done