Is there a better way to display cpu usage in tmux?

Question

Here's a solution which may consume a lot of cpu usage (stolen from this article):

There's a difference in my Ubuntu 12 ec2 server, I have to use top -bn1 instead of top -ln.

Here's my related .tmux.conf file:

set -g status-right '#[fg=yellow]#[(getCpuUsage.sh)]'

It actually calls top every 2 seconds and outputs a whole lot of information. I think there should be a way involving less cpu consumption or use some flag to limit the output of top to only cpu usage.

Answer 1

I use the small tmux-mem-cpu-load C++ program. It's at least one fork/exec per update either way, but probably better than invoking a shell.

Answer 2

If I knew tmux-mem-cpu-load, I would become too lazy to write my own rainbarf:

It has a fancier look, but it is a Perl script so it is not a good idea to run it every 2 seconds (on my experience, 15 seconds suffice).