How to get the CPU Usage in C#?

Question

I want to get the overall total CPU usage for an application in C#. I\'ve found many ways to dig into the properties of processes, but I only want the CPU usage of the proce

Answer 1

After spending some time reading over a couple different threads that seemed pretty complicated I came up with this. I needed it for an 8 core machine where I wanted to monitor SQL server. For the code below then I passed in "sqlservr" as appName.

private static void RunTest(string appName)
{
    bool done = false;
    PerformanceCounter total_cpu = new PerformanceCounter("Process", "% Processor Time", "_Total");
    PerformanceCounter process_cpu = new PerformanceCounter("Process", "% Processor Time", appName);
    while (!done)
    {
        float t = total_cpu.NextValue();
        float p = process_cpu.NextValue();
        Console.WriteLine(String.Format("_Total = {0}  App = {1} {2}%\n", t, p, p / t * 100));
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
    }
}

It seems to correctly measure the % of CPU being used by SQL on my 8 core server.