“psymon” is a powerful system and performance monitor written using Python (programming language). It is completely free to use, open-source and supports Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems.
It is true that both those OS platforms come with excellent built in tools of their own. The one in Windows 7 is a really features rich utility. But when compared to the one in Ubuntu, I think “psymon” is a better alternative.
Main features …
*. A simple user interface that lets you easily search and kill processes. Also has pretty looking graphs too.
*. Shows you the currently running processes (with user id, process id, memory and virtual memory usage, status, CPU usage, nice value etc).
*. CPU and Memory info in pretty graphs with information such as:
CPU history, user based CPU usage, total load or idle values, total memory usage and Swap memory details. You can easily enable/disable graphs of each individual category by click on the tabs as shown in the below screenshot.
*. Shows disk related data such as:
Disk I/O usage, write/read and mounted volumes.
*. Network monitoring with individual interface (if you have more than one network hardware) and shows you applications that use the network connection and their incoming/outgoing ports, IP addresses, network traffic information such as download/upload rates (in graphs) etc.
*. The last tab is for giving you advanced information for selected individual processes such as:
Their CPU & Memory details, local/remove id, pid, uptime, thread id, currently opened files etc.
Installation in Ubuntu …
1. First you’ll have to install a dependency needed by “psymon” manually called “python-psutil” (the one in Ubuntu’s repository is old). So go to this page and get the appropriate “.deb” package.
If however, since that page has like millions of links 😉 if you feel a bit lost, then just scroll down and under a sub heading called “Download python-psutil” you should see your package (choose the appropriate one depending on your CPU architecture).
Once the download is complete, double click on it and Ubuntu Software Center should install it for you.
Now we can install “psymon” as the required dependency is installed …
So to install “psymon” in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04, first go to this official “psymon” download page and click on the “.deb” package (including packages for other operating systems).
Again once the download completes, double click on it. When everything completes, you can search “psymon” in Unity desktop’s Dash and launch it. That’s it!.
It does not consume excessive amount of system resources to run. If however you want a system monitor that uses very little of your resources, then you should try a command-line based utility such Htop or Nmon which are known to be lightweight.
But nonetheless, if you’ve been looking for a powerful and extremely user friendly system monitor then ‘Psymon’ looks really good to me :).
download Python System Monitor