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

• is a free and simple tool to monitor a single process with its cpu and memory load. Project page
• Installation (via xo-get):

xo-get install pw

• Usage:

pw process_id / name / part_of_name

• Examples:

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

• Screenshots:

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