Stress Center

Stress Center is a fork of Mission Center, the GTK4/libadwaita system monitor, with one addition: a built-in Stress page that drives stress-ng to load-test your CPU and memory while showing live utilization, per-core load, package power and temperature graphs. Everything else — the Performance, Apps and Services pages — is unmodified Mission Center. See NOTICE.md for the full, itemized list of changes.

This is an independent fork, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Mission Center project.

What's different from Mission Center

• A new Stress tab alongside Performance/Apps/Services, added without modifying how those existing pages work.
• Controls for test type (CPU / Memory / CPU and Memory), worker count (defaults to your core count), duration, a CPU stress method picked from stress-ng --cpu-method which, and a --verify toggle (on by default).
• stress-ng's stdout/stderr are streamed live into a log pane in the page, with --verify failures and other errors highlighted in a distinct style so they're easy to spot.
• The existing CPU/temperature/power graph widgets are reused to chart utilization, per-core load, package power and temperature while a test runs, with the time range the test was active shaded on the graphs.
• Stop reliably tears down the whole stress-ng process group (it forks many workers), including on app quit or a crash — not just the direct child process.
• stress-ng is invoked directly from this (unprivileged) UI process; nothing was added to, or routed through, the magpie gatherer process.
• Renamed application ID, binary and desktop file (io.stresscenter.StressCenter / stress-center) so it can be installed alongside a real Mission Center without colliding.

Full details, including exactly which files were touched and why, are in NOTICE.md.

Everything Mission Center already does

• Monitor overall or per-thread CPU usage
• See system process, thread, and handle count, uptime, clock speed (base and current), cache sizes
• Monitor RAM and Swap usage
• See a breakdown how the memory is being used by the system
• Monitor Disk utilization and transfer rates
• Monitor network utilization and transfer speeds
• See network interface information such as network card name, connection type (Wi-Fi or Ethernet), wireless speeds and frequency, hardware address, IP address
• Monitor overall GPU usage, video encoder and decoder usage, memory usage and power consumption, powered by the popular NVTOP project
• See a breakdown of resource usage by app and process
• Supports a minified summary view for simple monitoring
• Uses GTK4 and Libadwaita, written in Rust

For the full upstream feature list and background, see the Mission Center README.

Installing

There are no prebuilt packages for this fork yet — build it from source (below), or use the included PKGBUILD on Arch-based distributions:

makepkg -si

If you just want Mission Center itself (not the stress-testing addition), see its own install options.

Building and running

Requirements are the same as upstream Mission Center, plus stress-ng at runtime for the Stress page (it's a runtime dependency, not a build dependency — meson setup will warn, not fail, if it's missing).

Requirements:

Dependency	Comment	Minimum Version
Meson		1.0.2
Rust		1.90
CMake		3.15
Python3		3.10
Python GObject Introspection	Used by Blueprint Compiler	N/A
DRM development libraries		N/A
GBM development libraries		N/A
udev development libraries		N/A
GTK 4		4.22
libadwaita		1.9
stress-ng	Runtime only, for the Stress page	N/A

Build instructions

# Avoid using "--depth=1" as it will not include submodules and the build will fail
git clone https://github.com/legendarylolo318-cloud/stress-center --recursive
cd stress-center

# On Ubuntu 26.04 all dependencies, except for the Rust toolchain and stress-ng, can be installed with:
sudo apt install build-essential cmake curl desktop-file-utils gettext git libadwaita-1-dev libdbus-1-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libudev-dev meson pkg-config protobuf-compiler python3-gi python3-pip stress-ng

BUILD_ROOT="$(pwd)/build-meson-debug"

meson setup "$BUILD_ROOT" -Dbuildtype=debug # Alternatively pass `-Dbuildtype=release` for a release build
ninja -C "$BUILD_ROOT"

If you want to run the application from the build directory (for development or debugging) some set up is required:

export PATH="$BUILD_ROOT/subprojects/magpie/src:$PATH"
export GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR="$BUILD_ROOT/data"
export MC_MAGPIE_HW_DB="$BUILD_ROOT/subprojects/magpie/platform-linux/hwdb/hw.db"
export MC_RESOURCE_DIR="$BUILD_ROOT/resources"

glib-compile-schemas --strict "$(pwd)/data" && mv "$(pwd)/data/gschemas.compiled" "$BUILD_ROOT/data/"

And then to run the app:

"$BUILD_ROOT/src/stress-center"

If you want to install the app just run:

ninja -C "$BUILD_ROOT" install

And run the app from your launcher or from the command-line:

stress-center

Flatpak, Snap and AppImage packaging from upstream are present in this fork's tree but are not maintained here and are not expected to build correctly — this fork only targets native/PKGBUILD builds.

Rebasing on upstream

This fork is intentionally structured to keep the diff against upstream Mission Center small: the Stress page lives entirely in new files (src/stress_page/, resources/ui/stress_page/), and existing files are touched only at the minimal points needed to register the new page and rename the app's identity. See NOTICE.md for the exact list.

Contributing / Issues

Issues and contributions for the Stress page addition are welcome via this repository's issue tracker. For anything about Mission Center itself (unrelated to the Stress page), please use the upstream issue tracker instead.

Translations

Translations are inherited from upstream Mission Center's .po files and have not been updated for the new Stress page strings. Contributions to translate the new strings are welcome.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Please see the COPYING file in the root of this repository for the complete license text (unchanged from upstream). Alternatively see the official license as written by the Free Software Foundation.

Code of Conduct

This fork follows the GNOME Code of Conduct, same as upstream Mission Center. All communications in project spaces are expected to follow it.