dynamically monitor program status

In Unix systems, it is possible to dynamically m开发者_C百科onitor the system by reading data from /proc. I am hoping to implement this kind of monitoring in my application, by dynamically saving "current status" into a file. However, I do not want IO delay my program, so it would be best to make the file virtual, i.e. not stored into disk but actually in memory. Is there a way of doint that? Thanks for the hint!

Why not used shared memory and semaphores. Do a 'man shmget' as a starting point.

As an alternative you could make your application a socket server. Doing this way you can have it responding with status information only if being asked to (there's not even the need to keep updating a memory area with the current status) and you can also control your program from a remote machine. If the status itself is not a huge quantity of data I think this is the most flexible solution.

If also you make your application responding to an HTTP request (i don't mean handling all the http protocol possibilities, just the requests you want to support) then you can also avoid to write a client and if you want to write it anyway it's probably easier to find libraries and programmers able to do that.

Make it listening to port 80 and you could check your program over the internet getting through firewalls without efforts :-) (well... assuming the program itself can be reached from the internet, but even for that it's a simple and common thing to ask for to sysadmins).

Try FUSE. it is particularly useful for writing virtual file systems. There are already many filesystems on top of it.

I have no idea about your exact requirements, so I can only guess, but every file that under linux is put into /dev/shm is in ram. But that doesn't mean it is not doing I/O, just that the I/O is faster. If you don't want to do I/O via filedescriptors or similar, do as someone else suggested and use shared memory segments, but this is a bit harder for everyone to read. Having other programs just open and read a file, which then calls some functions in your program (which is done by /proc in kernel space) is not possible. Maybe also a filesystem socket or fifo is something that suits your needs more (e.g. when you are having a select/(e)poll routine anyways). When you have full control over the system, also tmpfs might be useful for you.