the "CPU History" graph info is unclear

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-monitor

Hi! This report is about System Monitor 2.18.1.1, running on Ubuntu Feisty. It would be a nice fix for Gutsy.

Currently the CPU History graph in the System Monitor is a nice tool for a quick estimate of the current CPU usage, but only for a very rough estimate. The main problem is that the units are not very clear: the time axis is not marked at all, so I can at most estimate how long a spike took; the height is marked in percent -- but doesn't mention exactly of what.

I'm using Ubuntu on a Centrino Duo laptop, which can change the frequency of each processor according to several factors. (I'm not sure if it can scale each core separately, though. The factors I know are load and whether or not I'm plugged in, there may be some other heuristics.)

All this means that xy % processor usage can mean very different things in terms of how much work the computer is doing. At the very least, the legend below the graph -- [color] CPU#: ##.# % -- should be changed to something like [color] CPU#: ##.# % usage (at ## GHz) -- though this doesn't fix the graph. Maybe a different line (different shade or dotted) could indicate the frequency of the processor.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432892

[Dmitri Bachtin (damg)]

The time axis is present in the current builds of g-s-m.

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

As the time axis is present already, as mentioned in comment 2, and the remaining issue is that the cpu usage from the resource tab is not scaled based on the cpu frequency scaling, I am marking this bug as a duplicate of bug #214695, the bug about the frequency scaling-related issue.