Chapter 1. The GNOME System Monitor

Table of Contents
Description
The Processes window
The Memory Usage window
The Filesystems window
The Preferences Dialogue
Credits
Further sources of information
Caveats and errata

Description

The GNOME System Monitor menu entry starts a program called gtop. gtop is a graphical version of a text program called top. It displays information about all the programs running on your computer. There are three ways to start it:

UNIX and UNIX-like systems (Linux, Solaris, *BSD and so on) are multi-tasking, which means that they can run more than one program at a time. Each program can run one or more "tasks", or processes. All these processes share processor (CPU) time and memory. Whilst only one process can talk to a CPU at a time, the processes take turns at this which are very short. The result is that all the programs on the machine can proceed. gtop produces one or more constantly-updated windows which show you snapshots of the state of your system. The display can show you:

  1. processes: which processes are currently the most active and what they are doing;

  2. memory: how much memory is available and how much is in use;

  3. filesystems: how much of the filesystem is full or empty.

The gtop window also shows some additional system information at the bottom. In all windows, a menubar and toolbar are visible. These let you customise the current display of information or switch to a different display. In addition, you can get more information on a particular process by clicking on the name of that process in the process window.

By default, gtop will begin with the first window: processes.