s-tui: CPU Monitoring And Stress Testing Console UI Tool

s-tui console ui for cpu monitoring and stress testing

s-tui is a terminal user interface for monitoring the CPU frequency, utilization, temperature and power.

Besides monitoring your CPU using colored graphs, the TUI (terminal user interface) application can also stress test your CPU using stress or stress-ng. The stress test is configurable, allowing you to specify parameters like time out, Sqrt() and Sync() worker count, Malloc() / Free() worker count, and more.

s-tui can also integrate with FIRESTARTER, a process stress test utility, though note that this requires building s-tui from source, and apparently FIRESTARTER doesn't work on all systems.

The 4 graphs (CPU temperature, utilization, power and frequency) displayed by s-tui can be toggled on / off, and in the s-tui sidebar (you may need to scroll down in its sidebar if the terminal is not full-screen) you'll find the top and current CPU frequency, maximum and current temperature, current fan speed, and maximum and current power:

s-tui console ui for cpu values stress test

What's more, s-tui allows running custom shell scripts when certain thresholds are reached / exceeded, for example when the CPU temperature or utilization reaches a certain value. See how to do this here.

Other s-tui features include:

Shows performance dips caused by thermal throttling
Allows choosing the temperature sensor to display in the graph
Vim h, j, k, l key navigation for its sidebar
Save stats to CSV file (-c, --csv)
Option to display a single line of stats without TUI on the command line (-t, --terminal), or display it in a JSON format (-j, --json)
Option to disable the mouse for TTY systems (-nm, --no-mouse)

For its user interface, s-tui uses Urwid, a console user interface for Python. The tool is lightweight, requiring minimal system resources, and it doesn't require an X server to run.

Download s-tui

The link above includes Ubuntu / Linux Mint installation from PPA, Arch packages and PIP installation (it's not recommended using pip with sudo!).

A s-tui binary is available for download here (download the "s-tui" file).

To be able to run stress tests, you'll need to install stress or stress-ng. In Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and other Debian-based Linux distributions, you can install the stress package using this command: