I probably glance down at my system’s status displays way too often; surely graphs are addicting. But it really is handy to know what’s going on all the time. If I’m ever on a machine without this info, I just feel lost. Oh, if only my Android had one! I’ve been able to make faster and more sense out of the System Monitor since tweaking the colors, so I’m writing this to encourage my Linux compatriots to do the same.
First off, if you haven’t yet enabled the System Monitor, just right-click on your Panel and you should see it on the list. (Othewise: apt-get install gnome-system-monitor first)
By default the colors are all pretty similar. The first important tweak is to differentiate the Processor colors. Use whatever you want, but make sure they have enough contrast. (Not shown: I just fixed my green User color to contrast a little better.) Watching the Processor usage can show you a bit about the sites you spend time on (among several other things). If you’ve got a constant green bar (hmm, that sounds backwards to TDDers; maybe I should stay away from green), you might want to hunt down the tab hosting the unruly flash widget. Ideally, your system at rest should most often show a beautiful black box.
The second tweak I just made recently — and it’s growing on me — is to make outgoing network traffic red, and incoming yellow. Now I can see my backups to S3 in full swing when they kick in. And I might notice if anything is unexpectedly drifting outbound.
I also recently added the fourth Swap Space indicator just in case it ever kicks in, at which point I’ll know something is really awry. This one is probably not too important to have showing if you’re shy on Panel space.
Great! Now I can watch Firefox and a Mongrel take off with all my memory and know when to kill them. The monitor is also handy to see when something you’ve been running is (too often unexpectedly) finished. (I like using beep at the end of a long command for this too.)
I do still use top on occasion for its light weight. But sometimes it’s a bit more convenient to have a one-click GUI view of your system. Please share if you’ve got a more effective color scheme or if you use another light-weight tool for continuous monitoring.
I'm a huge fan of system-monitor myself but never thought of customizing it. Thanks esp to the idea of separating out the cores in ProcessorUsage.
system-monitor is good, as long as it just sits there on the panel happily drawing graphs. If I ever want to see more info — like what's taking max processor, max virtual memory, max memory, and additionally kill processes — I use htop (top on steroids)
Thanks for mentioning htop, Jeff! I wasn't familiar with it but love colorful consoles. Will definitely start using getting to know it. The commands look a little different from top. At one point I had my top nicely colored and customized but I seem to have lost that config (actually forgot about it). BTW, since writing this I've gotten rid of the Swap window (never lit up) and added Harddisk with yellow for reads and red for writes. So almost identical to Network coloring. It turns out to be slightly different from IOWait on Processor view.
I agree that System Monitor is a bit of a hog in full mode. Often nice to quickly pull up though and sort everything with one click by %CPU or Memory to see who's the culprit. Sometimes it takes me a sec with top to remember "O-n-<enter>-<space>-<space>-<space>".