Comments on: At-A-Glance System Monitoring With Panel Applets

By: prandipadaro

prandipadaro — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:11:11 +0000

how to in unity? in ubuntu 10.04 is easy but in 11.04?

By: chAlx

chAlx — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:46:44 +0000

down:

Wouldn’t it more interesting for developer to fix these bugs commented? I’ve just checked: mouseover do interrupt the network monitor graph, and its scaling is a nonsence.

By: down

down — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:08:54 +0000

Great useful postgreat post – very interesting to read your views as a developer on this debate.

By: Pingvinrich

Pingvinrich — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:54:48 +0000

Here’s a tip: change the background colour of the graphs to the colour of your panel (use the eyedropper). It looks much better.

(tiny bug – the background starts as black and doesn’t completely update to the selected colour until it has redrawn all the graph to overwrite it).

By: jldugger

jldugger — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:22:24 +0000

I also change the iowait color, since it’s a dramatically different performance characteristic, but I choose yellow. Red seems a bit antagonistic, I donno. It’s probably a good idea to change the default away from “indistinguishable from black” but it’s also very nearly the perfect storm for “bike shedding”.

By: Al

Al — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:33:34 +0000

Not that it’s a major problem but has anyone else noticed that as you mouse-in to the applet (any ‘window’, not just networking) that the network monitor drop to zero?

Try it now – go and download a sufficiently large file (10+ MiB?) and you’ll hopefully see your connection max out, not now mouse in and out of the applet, you’ll see the network monitor graph drop every time you go in. It also annoys me how the graph has no maximum. Not even a configurable fixed maximum. So when my network, on idel, does a random 3kb every 10 seconds it looks like I’m maxing out my connection every 10 seconds for one second. Annoying, but hey.

Like I said it’s not a big problem at all, just annoying. I’ve only have the CPU and network monitors active for this applet but also have another applet on my auto-hide taskbar that textually tells me the download and upload rates separately. So I use the network monitor described here as a general monitor, but if I want to know actual values (so see if I *am* maxing out my connection with a certain download I’ll mouseover my bottom bar to show me the textual rate. I wish I had a network monitor that had a configurable maximum, though, as that would save me needing two applets.

By: George

George — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:24:04 +0000

I think the default update interval is not short enough, especially for CPUs since its usage usually changes dynamically in a short time. So I usually set it to around 100 ms.

The four boxes on my panel are: CPU, RAM, network, and disk I/O.

By: Erigami Scholey-Fuller

Erigami Scholey-Fuller — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:16:15 +0000

I find that the most useful stats are load, memory, and processor.

I care most about the IO wait time (I’m not sure why, I just do), so I’ve changed the default colour from a blue that looks almost identical to the other processor colours to red. And presto! The applet is much easier to read.