Monitoring System Load

About

• Resources are limited: the less load an activity needs, the better!
• Best time to start monitoring the system load is during development; it's easy!
• Pygame best-practices are shown Game development HOWTO here and discussed here

Tools

• Monitoring System Load
  • top ... the good old top is also on the xo
  • htop .. is a more detailed, flexible, colorful version of top
• Monitor a single process
  • pw.py .. a tool originating from olpc-austria

htop

installation:

$ su
# yum install htop

htop reacts on mouse-clicks - especially useful since the f-keys for the options are not working on the xo.

Process view:

XO-friendly setup:

pw.py

• pw.py is a free and simple tool to monitor a single process with its cpu and memory load
  
• Source (GPL) [3 files]: tar.gz zip tree
• Existing plugins:
  • pw-plugin-console.py ....... Console text output (cpu < 0.4%)
  • pw-plugin-gtk_graph.py ... a simple graph with gtk (cpu < 1.3%)
• Planned plugins:
  • pw-plugin-rrd-collect.py ... collect data for rrd and send over network
  • pw-plugin-rrd_tool.py ...... receive data and draw graph with rrd
• Feedback: chris (at) linuxuser (dot) at
• Usage:

pw.py process_id/name/part_of_name

Examples:
  1. 'pw.py fire' ... possibly capture firefox
  2. 'pw.py 8285' ... watch process with pid 8285
  3. 'pw.py pw.py' .. watch last pw.py

• Screenshots:

Monitoring Firefox:	GTK Graph (mem=grey, cpu=white):
Capturing the Journal:
Another Graph on the xo: