Performance

The main reason to consider the proc interface is the performance of some standard Linux tools. Running applications like top or the ps-utilities on embedded systems show that these tools simply have too high CPU-demands for the system. Analysing these problems unveils:

• System calls are expensive but heavily used by some tools,
• The executables are large because they are providing more functionality than required,
• File system utilisation issues arise if many small tools are built ( buzybox solves that problem partially),
• Not all desired information is accessible easily.

Let's look at some of these issues in more detail, as they could be relevant for the analysis of other performance bottlenecks on embedded systems.