why-linux

why-linux is a small Linux CLI to spot sustained resource pressure and show the top offenders.

Quick start

cd why-linux
cargo run --release

Common usage

# sample for 10s at 1s intervals (default)
cargo run --release --

# custom duration + interval
cargo run --release -- --duration 20 --interval 2

# JSON output
cargo run --release -- --json

# HTML report
cargo run --release -- --report /tmp/why-linux-report.html

Flags

• --duration <u64>: total sampling duration in seconds (default 10)
• --interval <u64>: sampling interval in seconds (default 1)
• --cpu-threshold <f32>: CPU percent considered high (default 20.0)
• --mem-threshold <f32>: system memory percent considered high (default 80.0)
• --disk-threshold <f32>: filesystem percent considered high (default 90.0)
• --io-read-threshold <u64>: read bytes/sec considered high (default 5_000_000)
• --io-write-threshold <u64>: write bytes/sec considered high (default 5_000_000)
• -j, --json: print machine-readable JSON
• --report <path>: write a self-contained HTML report

Releases

To publish binaries for Linux x86_64 and aarch64:

1. Create a version tag and push it:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

2. GitHub Actions builds and uploads:

• why-linux-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
• why-linux-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Each release also includes a .sha256 file for verification:

sha256sum -c why-linux-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz.sha256