Mark Grieveson wrote: > Hello. Is there a command line utility for system resource > measurement?
Try 'ps -el' or a custom query with ps. The "SZ" field is the number of pages of memory used by the process. Pages are 4096 bytes. Or you might try 'free' both before and after starting a process and after exiting the process and subtracting the difference. Because pages may be shared it is not completely simple to get an accurate measurement of the amount of pages used incrementally any particular program. > I have an old Pentium III (450 MHz, 384 MB ram) and normally I use > gnome, but I've been experimenting with other desktop environments > and/or window managers. I'm not convinced that I'm any better off > though (my computer still sometimes freezes, especially when using > mplayer, even when using a supposedly low resources window manager). Use 'vmstat' and look at the si/so (swapin/swapout) fields. You may be swapping. A healthy system IMHO will have a reasonable amount of free space for filesystem buffer cache. There are various ways to show this. The 'htop' command will show a curses based picture of it. Another alternative is 'cat /proc/meminfo' for the raw data. I think 'htop' makes this visible in the easiest to use way. If you have X running then 'xosview' is an X based program also very useful for this. Don't be misled and look at free memory as an indicator. Linux will optimize free memory as low as possible by putting it to work as filesystem buffer cache. That is a good thing. Free memory is memory that is not working for you. Look at used memory as how much memory applications on your system are using in total. You want enough left over to supply a reasonable filesystem buffer cache. If filesystem buffer cache suffers then performance suffers because all disk I/O will be out of cache and will have to wait for the disk synchronously. > The one that seems the best is ion2, but I also like my > fluxbox setup, and xfce is okay. You might also want to look at FVWM. FVWM was developed on and for low memory laptops. It is probably considered old-school today but I still use fvwm daily on my fully decked out desktop. Bob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]