nmingotti/smem

Simple memory monitor X widget for FreeBSD

smem

Simple, non-intrusive, memory monitor X widget for FreeBSD

WHAT IT DOES

• It is a simple memory monitor application to run in X Window customized for FreeBSD.
• Its look is similar to a WindowMaker dockapp.
• Each seconds it prints on the graphical widget the amount of Free Memory, Inact Memory and Swap used memory. These are the same names appearing in FreeBSD top output.

Requires

• Requires TclTk, at least release 8.5
• Tested in FreeBSD-11.1, TclTk release 8.5.
• Techincally it should work on every Unix-like system having the command top, in practice, different OS will provide different "top" output, se the script will need some little modifications.

Rationale

• I developed this little monitor because I want to track continuously what happens in my system memory. We have long thread running about swap in forums.freebsd.org, I maitain some kind of summary of that here
• This app was originally developed in Ruby + Tk. Since there is not package to easily install Ruby-Tk in FreeBSD-11.1 I rewrote it in TclTk.
• extra -- complaint it is a mistake not to have Tk bundled with Ruby. It is a lot annoying not to have a GUI by default in a scripting language. Python and Tcl have shown the way.