Resource Monitoring Tools

There are programs available to watch various aspects of your system.

iftop

See active internet connections. e.g.

# iftop -i eth1

Will show you websites that don't close a connection, when the tab is left open. A privacy and security nightmare. This is a reason why Javascript is bad.

vmstat

See RAM usage. Can be watched, to monitor swapping. e.g.

$ vmstat 3

Leave it running. It will update every 3 seconds.

iotop

See HDD accesses. e.g.

# iotop --only
# iotop -o

only flag will show active processes only

# iotop -d 0.01 

delay flag can be set to be faster than 1 second. Some writes are missed otherwise.

Monitor Library Reads from PID

$ ltrace -p -pidhere-

See what a program is doing. (Note: not available on ARM deb repos)