I suppose it's a pretty trivial question but nevertheless, I'm looking for the (sacct I guess) command that will display the CPU time and memory used by a slurm job ID.
7 Answers
If your job is finished, then the sacct
command is what you're looking for. Otherwise, look into sstat
. For sacct
the --format switch is the other key element. If you run this command:
sacct -e
you'll get a printout of the different fields that can be used for the --format switch. The details of each field are described in the Job Account Fields section of the man page. For CPU time and memory, CPUTime and MaxRSS are probably what you're looking for. cputimeraw can also be used if you want the number in seconds, as opposed to the usual Slurm time format.
sacct --format="CPUTime,MaxRSS"

- 651
- 6
- 17

- 886
- 7
- 2
-
14Just a note for people that land here searching for real time… use `Elapsed` instead (+1). – Sparhawk Jun 06 '16 at 04:00
-
7The value returned for `CPUTime` is always the value of `NCPUS` * `Elapsed`. To get stats about real CPU usage you need to look at `SystemCPU` and `UserCPU`, but the docs warns that it only measure CPU time for the parent process and not for child processes. – Jean Paul Apr 25 '17 at 14:49
-
6MaxRSS seems to always be empty for running tasks (at least for me). Is there some other option / other way to get some estimate on a running task's memory. – Kvothe Feb 14 '19 at 10:49
-
1What decides whether a job is still shown in sacct. It seems it does not show data on old jobs? – Kvothe Sep 04 '19 at 10:21
-
How can I retrieve `SystemCPU and UserCPU` should I use `acct`? – alper Jan 22 '21 at 14:12
-
Any idea why `sacct -u username` does not work for other users? Even while being admin. – Naeem Khoshnevis Feb 09 '21 at 23:19
The other answers all detail formats for output of sacct
, which is great for looking at multiple jobs aggregated in a table.
However, sometimes you want to look at a specific job in more detail, so you can tell whether your job efficiently used the allocated resources. For that, seff
is very useful. The syntax is simply seff <Jobid>
. For example, here's a recent job of mine (that failed):
$ seff 15780625
Job ID: 15780625
Cluster: mycluster
User/Group: myuser/mygroup
State: OUT_OF_MEMORY (exit code 0)
Nodes: 1
Cores per node: 16
CPU Utilized: 12:06:01
CPU Efficiency: 85.35% of 14:10:40 core-walltime
Job Wall-clock time: 00:53:10
Memory Utilized: 1.41 GB
Memory Efficiency: 70.47% of 2.00 GB
Note that the key CPU metric, CPU Utilized, corresponds to the TotalCPU field from sacct
, while Memory Utilized corresponds to MaxRSS.

- 5,016
- 1
- 30
- 25
-
is there also a way to retrieve average RSS, or a time series of the memory usage over the life of the job? – Rylan Schaeffer Aug 04 '20 at 15:48
-
-
-
@RylanSchaeffer Please post a new question with the details of what you're trying to achieve (Use the "Ask Question" button at the top of the page, not the comments) – SpinUp __ A Davis Aug 05 '20 at 18:03
-
I did yesterday https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63250581/find-cpu-and-memory-time-series-of-slurm-job – Rylan Schaeffer Aug 05 '20 at 18:48
-
Comments are fine for clarifying. Your answer of specifying *what* to use without specifying *how* to use it isn't helpful – Rylan Schaeffer Aug 05 '20 at 18:48
-
17Is seff standard on slurm managed clusters? It isn't finding that command for me. – Kvothe Feb 02 '21 at 17:05
-
@Kvothe Sorry, I don't know -- it wasn't something I added, it was installed on the one I use – SpinUp __ A Davis Feb 05 '21 at 20:28
-
5
-
@alper It appears to have been added to Slurm [circa 2015](https://bugs.schedmd.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1611), so it's probably something to ask your cluster administrator about – SpinUp __ A Davis Nov 09 '21 at 16:27
-
I am using slurm by myself unfortunetly there is not administrator to ask about. I clone slurm from its github repo and compiled it using: `./configure --enable-debug --enable-front-end` but there is not `seff ` binary is installed – alper Nov 09 '21 at 19:43
-
I haven't installed it myself so I'm not much help -- the only advice I could give would be to check out the `seff` tarball attached to the thread that I linked, or ask a separate question, either here or on the slurm forums – SpinUp __ A Davis Nov 10 '21 at 16:38
-
Is there a way to automatically print the seff output in the output file generated during the job? I previously used a PBS job scheduler which produced similar output by default at the end of the output files requested in the PBS job scheduler. I'm looking for the SLURM equivalent – Bob Mar 30 '22 at 16:21
-
1@SpinUp__ADavis im trying to understand how your job died from insufficient memroy when 'memory utilized' (1.41G) is quite a bit less than allocated (2G), and utilization was only 70%. In my case a job died with an even bigger spread - 10M or .52% of 2G. would like to know the amount of memory i need to request but doesnt seem this will get me there. – aknodt Jun 17 '23 at 23:09
-
1@aknodt Other sources indicate that the accounting mechanism is [polling based](https://stackoverflow.com/a/64544070/1329892), so it might not catch spikes in memory usage before the job gets killed for OOM. I think the most straightforward way is to allocate much more memory to a job than you think you'll need, and kill it if necessary once it's fully underway, then go back and look at Memory Utilized to get a better sense of the upper limit you can get away with. – SpinUp __ A Davis Jun 23 '23 at 17:07
sacct
is indeed the command to use for finished jobs. For running jobs, you can look at the sstat
command.

- 52,978
- 9
- 96
- 110
-
8Actually, you can monitor running jobs with `sacct` with the state flag, e.g. `sacct -s r` – metasequoia Feb 02 '17 at 01:20
@aaron.kizmiller is right, sacct
is the command to use.
One can fetch all of the following fields by passing them into saact --format="field,field"
Account AdminComment AllocCPUS AllocGRES
AllocNodes AllocTRES AssocID AveCPU
AveCPUFreq AveDiskRead AveDiskWrite AvePages
AveRSS AveVMSize BlockID Cluster
Comment ConsumedEnergy ConsumedEnergyRaw CPUTime
CPUTimeRAW DerivedExitCode Elapsed ElapsedRaw
Eligible End ExitCode GID
Group JobID JobIDRaw JobName
Layout MaxDiskRead MaxDiskReadNode MaxDiskReadTask
MaxDiskWrite MaxDiskWriteNode MaxDiskWriteTask MaxPages
MaxPagesNode MaxPagesTask MaxRSS MaxRSSNode
MaxRSSTask MaxVMSize MaxVMSizeNode MaxVMSizeTask
McsLabel MinCPU MinCPUNode MinCPUTask
NCPUS NNodes NodeList NTasks
Priority Partition QOS QOSRAW
ReqCPUFreq ReqCPUFreqMin ReqCPUFreqMax ReqCPUFreqGov
ReqCPUS ReqGRES ReqMem ReqNodes
ReqTRES Reservation ReservationId Reserved
ResvCPU ResvCPURAW Start State
Submit Suspended SystemCPU Timelimit
TotalCPU UID User UserCPU
WCKey WCKeyID WorkDir
For example, to list all job ids, elapsed time, and max VM size, you can run:
sacct --format='JobID,Elapsed,MaxVMSize'

- 25,611
- 17
- 169
- 224
-
Thus, if I want to know how many SBU I have used, I should run: `sacct -ojobid,state,cputime` To get a jobID, the sate and the actual amount of SBU I have used ? – runlevel0 May 27 '19 at 09:21
Although there already exist fantastic solutions, I share an another perspective.
This method can do the real time monitoring of a lot of nodes.
We can write a script monitor.sh
to obtain the statistic(memory as an example), then logged it into file.
#! /bin/sh
if [ -f "./free.log_"`hostname` ];then
echo "file existed , now deleting it !"
rm ./free.log_`hostname`
fi
echo "start recording!"
while true
do
echo "******["`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S`"]******" >> free.log_`hostname`
free -s 1 -c 2 -h|sed -n 1,2p >> free.log_`hostname`
done
Then write your job script sbatch_input.sh
, which can be called by sbatch.
#! /bin/sh
#SBATCH -N 2
#SBATCH -p cnall
srun hostname
srun ./monitor.sh
Call the script
sbatch ./sbatch_input.sh
We can see some log generated.

- 1,213
- 1
- 11
- 24
-
Great suggestion, thanks! How should I do this alongside my actual job? Should I just include the extra `srun ./monitor.sh` on my original sbatch call, or should I create another call? – kaslusimoes Apr 01 '21 at 09:58
You can export SACCT_FORMAT
and just type sacct
every time.
$ export SACCT_FORMAT="JobID%20,JobName,User,Partition,NodeList,Elapsed,CPUTime,State,AllocTRES%32"
$ sacct
JobID JobName User Partition NodeList Elapsed CPUTime State AllocTRES
-------------------- ---------- --------- ---------- --------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- --------------------------------
249527_4 xgb_tune zhaoqi cn cn12 00:26:50 1-11:46:40 RUNNING billing=80,cpu=80,mem=100G,node+
249527_1 xgb_tune zhaoqi cn cn09 00:26:50 1-11:46:40 RUNNING billing=80,cpu=80,mem=100G,node+
249527_2 xgb_tune zhaoqi cn cn10 00:26:50 1-11:46:40 RUNNING billing=80,cpu=80,mem=100G,node+
249527_3 xgb_tune zhaoqi cn cn11 00:26:50 1-11:46:40 RUNNING billing=80,cpu=80,mem=100G,node+
ref: https://docs.ycrc.yale.edu/clusters-at-yale/job-scheduling/resource-usage/

- 2,147
- 2
- 24
- 33
sacct -a -j <job_id> --format=user%10,jobname%10,node%10,start%10,end%10,elapsed%10,MaxRS
use the command sacct
to access finished slurm job history
for <job_id>
, it's referring to the slurm job id
then, this --format=
to mention the different details to display, with which format:
- the
user
: the user run the job - the
jobname
: the job or process name - the
node
: this to indicate in which machine the job was done - the
start
andend
are indicating successively the job start and end dates - for
elapsed
it's about the runtime of job or process, - and
MaxRS
for max cpus used to get the job done - for
%
it's used to determine how much characters to dedicated for printing a given info (e.g jobname%25: Jobname will be displayed in 25 characters)

- 41
- 5
-
Please don't post only code as answer, but also provide an explanation what your code does and how it solves the problem of the question. Answers with an explanation are usually more helpful and of better quality, and are more likely to attract upvotes. – Mark Rotteveel May 08 '22 at 11:58