How much swap?

[Ian Petersen]

> You may be surprised, but for monitoring of your desktop I recommend
> the system monitor applet for gnome-panel, it shows you how much
> memory and swap is in use in real time, and also shows you how much of
> that memory usage is from cache, buffers, applications, and shared
> memory.  You can see clearly how much is "real" memory usage and how
> much is just disk caching.  The applet also can show CPU, HDD, and
> network usage, and I definitely can't live without it, hehe..

I used to rely on the applet you're referring to, but I find gkrellm
vastly superior.  See
http://members.dslextreme.com/users/billw/gkrellm/gkrellm.html for
some screen shots and further details.

For those who have never heard of gkrellm and don't want to click the
link, it's basically a pluggable stack of system monitors.  It's
client-server, and you can actually monitor a remote machine with it.
Right now, I can see the current date and time, the utilization of
each core on my CPU as a percentage and a graph, the number of
processes, the number of logged-in users (according to utmp), the fork
rate (in processes/sec, I think), the CPU temp, hdd activity, eth0
activity, loopback activity, memory usage (I think it ignores caches
and buffers), swap usage, disk space on each mounted partition, number
of emails waiting on my server (unread and total), and the uptime.  On
my laptop, I can also see battery life remaining, and I think it shows
me when I'm running on AC, too.

A number of times I've been notified of a brute-force attack against
my ssh server because of an unusual spike in activity on eth0.
Running grkellm slowly teaches you what your system "normally" looks
like, and any deviations are readily visible.

As you say, Simon, I can't live without it.  :P

Ian

-- 
Tired of pop-ups, security holes, and spyware?
Try Firefox: http://www.getfirefox.com
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists