Installation | Configuration | Resources Displayed | Contributing

NBResuse

NB Resource Usage (NBResuse) is a small extension for Jupyter Notebooks that displays an indication of how much resources your current notebook server and its children (kernels, terminals, etc) are using. This is displayed in the main toolbar in the notebook itself, refreshing every 5s.

Installation

You can currently install this package from PyPI.

pip install nbresuse[resources]

The above command will install NBResuse along with psutil Python package (which is used for getting hardware usage information from the system). If you would like to install NBResuse without psutil (in which case NBResuse does essentially nothing), run pip install nbresuse instead.

If your notebook version is < 5.3, you need to enable the extension manually.

jupyter serverextension enable --py nbresuse --sys-prefix
jupyter nbextension install --py nbresuse --sys-prefix
jupyter nbextension enable --py nbresuse --sys-prefix

Configuration

Memory Limit

nbresuse can display a memory limit (but not enforce it). You can set this in several ways:

1. MEM_LIMIT environment variable. This is set by JupyterHub if using a spawner that supports it.
2. In the commandline when starting jupyter notebook, as --ResourceUseDisplay.mem_limit.
3. In your Jupyter notebook traitlets config file

The limit needs to be set as an integer in Bytes.

Memory usage warning threshold

The background of the resource display can be changed to red when the user is near a memory limit. The threshold for this warning can be configured as a fraction of the memory limit.

If you want to flash the warning to the user when they are within 10% of the memory limit, you can set the parameter --ResourceUseDisplay.mem_warning_threshold=0.1.

CPU Usage

nbresuse can also track CPU usage and report a cpu_percent value as part of the /metrics response.

You can set the cpu_limit in several ways:

1. CPU_LIMIT environment variable. This is set by JupyterHub if using a spawner that supports it.
2. In the command line when starting jupyter notebook, as --ResourceUseDisplay.cpu_limit.
3. In your Jupyter notebook traitlets config file

The limit corresponds to the number of cpus the user has access to, but does not enforce it.

Additionally, you can set the track_cpu_percent trait to enable CPU usage tracking (disabled by default):

c = get_config()
c.NotebookApp.ResourceUseDisplay.track_cpu_percent = True

As a command line argument:

jupyter notebook --ResourceUseDisplay.track_cpu_percent=True

Resources Displayed

Currently the server extension only reports memory usage (just RSS) and CPU usage. Other metrics will be added in the future as needed.

The notebook extension currently doesn't show CPU usage, only memory usage.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to the project, please read the CONTRIBUTING.md. The CONTRIBUTING.md file explains how to set up a development installation and how to run the test suite.