Python: How to obtain current bandwidth usage?

Question

I need to get current bandwidth usage on given interface in my Python code. How can I achieve this?

I tried to extract the value from /proc/net/dev twice with short sleep interval (e.g. 0.3s) between two consecutive calls and compute the difference in bytes divided by time. It works but I do not know if I can trust this results. I'm looking for some more elegant solutions. Any tools, libraries, or simple algorithms?

I will appreciate all suggestions!

Answer 1

There are libraries for this, like PSutil, but if you are on *Nix I would opt for using the underlying system.

Although you could use /proc/net/dev, rather use /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics since you will not have to parse anything since there are individual files for each statistic