Performance Basics "always-on" awareness

[Federico Lucifredi]

Hello Computing Performance,
I was playing with Byobu in Ubuntu 11.04 today,

https://launchpad.net/byobu
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/en/man1/byobu.1.html

and I was very pleased with the results. This is a screenshot of what
my quake-terminal looks like now:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/86679254@N00/6163955481/lightbox/

The remarkable bit is having at your hands, literally all the time,
the amounts of RAM, Swap, CPU clock/state, Network I/O, Disk I/O, Disk
storage, Uptime - and a few highly specific things like the strength
of the WiFi signal.

Nothing is remarkable here -- we discuss tools that bring out these
metrics, and many more sophisticated ones, all the time here. And
applets for pretty much any OS in existance will slap such data into
view in your window manager's background, notification area, or
dashboard of choice. So why am I excited by this?

The key bit of Byobu is that it is an overlay on GNU Screen, which a
lot of us are using already. And that makes it significant, because
you get the information awareness in Init3, while connecting to your
cloud machines or to your headless servers. Sure, you can look at
Nagios or your monitoring tool of choice, but it is so handy to have
the environment awareness of what's going on all the time. And you get
to learn how much your disk I/O and CPU will shoot up for your 'make'
runs - not to mention help you notice breakage (RAID issues and other
notifications can overlay), even when you don't know something is
irregular yet. I bet once one develops a feeling for it, if becomes
possible to get a feeling for fans needing cleaning on your laptop as
temperature edges up, before random reboots arrive.

Now, I need to find some time to build a few SystemTap scripts to
have a few extra notifications :) And someone else should port Byobu
to Solaris and OS-X, so the Dtrace folk can do the same trick!

Best -Federico

--
_________________________________________
-- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
(Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi at acm.org - GnuPG 0x4A73884C