How to get the CPU usage of the background process on the windows platform.

[ArnoldFu]

The 'process.CPUPercent()' method works for front process, but it does not works for background process. The program prompts 'could not get CreationDate: Access is denied'.
How to get the CPU usage of the background process on the windows platform.

[Lomanic]

I can reproduce, it occurs for processes run by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM, NT AUTHORITY\NETWROK, NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL and it looks like it has to do with SeDebugPrivilege. With admin rights it seems doable to port this C# program to enable SeDebugPrivilege for the current process with windows syscalls. Python's psutil indeed has a function psutil_set_se_debug called here.

I can work on this during the weekend if nobody takes this task.

[shirou]

@Lomanic Thank you! Since I can not work this weekend, I would very appreciate if you can work on this issue.

[ArnoldFu]

@Lomanic
Yes, the processes run by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.
I have already run the program as an administrator, but it doesn't works.
I would very grateful if you could help me solve this problem.

[Lomanic]

So far I have the above commit, but it is currently not functional (Access Denied even as admin), I don't know what the problem is, maybe I will look at it in the future. Anybody can take this task in the mean time.

[fanlw0816]

I have also encountered this problem, Is this problem solved?

[onkarbanerjee]

Is this solved. I dont think it is yet.

[Lomanic]

This was fixed by the commit that closed this issue, as usual on Github.

[cwegener]

This seems silly.

SeDebugPrivilege was originally introduced by Jay Loden in version 0.1.1 of psutil for the purposes of killing a process. giampaolo/psutil@4a9678b

Whilst that original implementation is still very questionable (why does psutil have a need to bypass the Win32 security system by using the SeDebugPrivilege instead of returning an actual 'access denied' error if the user who runs psutil does not have permissions to kill the process? Does psutil do the same bypassing of the OS security on non-Windows platforms?), at least the original implementation was strictly limited to psutil's kill() API.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have asked that question when this feature was originally implemented, and now everyone seems to be blindly following this bad example.

E.g. in psutil, this bad example escalated many years later to running THE WHOLE psutil process with the SeDebugPrivilege ALL THE TIME and not only for the limited task for which it was originally implemented (the kill() API. And also because the original implementation was probably faulty ...)

giampaolo/psutil#1429