Question

I’m currently writing a Java application that needs to look at how “heavily loaded” the machine it’s running on is. On *nix, load average divided by number of processors fits the bill perfectly, and we retrieve load average with ManagementFactory.getOperatingSystemMXBean().getSystemLoadAverage(). Unfortunately, this returns -1 on Windows, as the call is apparently too “expensive” to be called frequently. What’s the easiest way to retrieve similar Windows metrics such as the processor queue length or CPU utilisation, either in pure Java or via JNI?

Answer 1

You can retrieve the CPU utilization on Windows using WMI. Some code and documentation for accessing WMI from Java appears to be available here.