Re: System Monitor Graph Style Suggestions

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Feb 15, 2006, at 2:24 PM, David Malcolm wrote:
> ...
> On the subject of Tufte and gnome-system-monitor, I've implemented a
> GtkCellRenderer subclass for sparklines and implemented it for the
> per-process CPU usage:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319682
> ...
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=53853&action=view

That's gorgeous! Well done.

> ...
> Going much beyond, who is the intended user of gnome-system-monitor, 
> and what is its purpose?  Is it simply a GTK replacement for "top", or 
> is it intended to show something that's meaningful to:
> - end-users?
> - sysadmins?
> - software developers?
> (I don't think that "top" is particularly good for any of the above)

I thought the most common use of it was for closing unresponsive 
programs. Maybe I'm just unlucky. :-)

But if that is a common use, it's a bit awkward, since the list uses 
pretty unrecognizable names for many programs (soffice.bin, eog, esd, 
sol, wtf, bbq), and by default lists many things that aren't programs 
as most people would understand them (bonobo-activation-server, 
dbus-daemon, gam_server, etc etc). Maybe the list of processes could be 
filtered by default somehow, based on whether they were spawned from 
programs that have .desktop entries? Working towards giving the 
underlying executables human-readable names would help, too.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/