[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Displaying the current status of system resources (such as memory, cpu)

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

On 06/15/2010 05:48 PM, Anish Mangal wrote:
> Sugar presently lacks a means to display the current status of system
> resources such as free memory, CPU load, etc. I'd like form an opinion
> as to what should be the ideal way to make these numbers available to
> the user.

That's a great question!

The original Sugar design specifically called for the Home View's Activity
Ring [1] to display the memory usage of every running activity, and there
were even test implementations of this.  It proved difficult to measure
memory usage well, and the Activity Ring was dropped with the Sugar 0.82
interface redesign.  However, tools for measuring memory usage in Linux
have improved since then.  I think showing the memory usage of each
activity would be very useful.

Showing per-activity CPU usage would also be interesting, although I think
it is both harder and less useful than memory usage, because it changes so
rapidly.

> Perhaps an icon (or a set of icons) could be added to frame to
> graphically display real time data, their context menu revealing more
> detailed information.

I personally think that per-activity numbers are often more interesting
than system-wide numbers.  As such, I would associate the resource
utilization statistics with each running activity's icon in the taskbar
(top frame bar).  The problem is how to display the information in a way
that is discoverable but not intrusive.

--Ben

[1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_ring

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