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

[Frederick Grose]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <
bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

> 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


See also
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Designs/Activity_Management#Memory_economics<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Designs/Activity_Management#Memory_economics:>
and Eben's reply,
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-April/005021.html.
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