Monitoring System Load

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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


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:
Htop list.png
XO-friendly setup:
Htop setup.png


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:
  • 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:
Pw fire.png
GTK Graph (mem=grey, cpu=white):
Pw fire gtk.png

Capturing the Journal:
Xo-journal.png

Another Graph on the xo:
Xo-graph.png