Package: x11-apps Version: 0.1 Severity: wishlist File: /usr/bin/xload
The vertical scale of xload adjusts to accommodate the highest load level. It has horizontal lines to indicate the vertical scale. A high enough load shall cause these lines to be so closely spaced that there is no space between them: the entire display is then white (I have reverse video set, so the background is black and scale lines are white) and I can no longer see the load varying, on account of the lines. Modern machines can endure quite immense loads, so this problem can readilly arise (I routinely get it when running make -j -l 12, if some of the processes make first fires off do very vigorous things once started). The machine is happy, but xload becomes useless ! If the load has a transient spike, the vertical scale adapts to let the spike's top be displayed: if the spike is high enough, xload becomes useless until the spike has scrolled off the left hand end - or until I kill it and start a fresh xload, losing all the data that was on display for the prior four hours (yes, xload is almost the full width of my screen). Note that setting the foreground colour of xload doesn't help: the grid lines are drawn on top of the load data, so would hide it. This could readilly enough be remedied by providing a command-line option, --clip-at=n, to tell xload to not try to display any load level above n. More fancy solutions are possible. It may be sufficient simply to draw the load data on top of the scale lines; then -foreground=red would suffice to make the load graph's shape visible, even when the scale lines are so closely packed as to form a featureless background (giving no indication of scale - other than "OMG that's high !"). If the vertical scale is huge enough that the horizontal lines use up more than (say) half of the pixels available for vertical height (at this point, it's possible - but getting hard - to read the display), xload could drop the granularity of its vertical scale; only display one in 10 of the horizontal lines, for example. Naturally, this would require some way to indicate that the scale has been adjusted; e.g. the load-level difference between horizontal lines could be displayed in the top left corner of the chart. Of course, the value of 10 (the base of the number system in use) could be controlled by a command-line parameter; or it could just be hard-coded to ten or 0x10. Alternatively, the horizontal lines could be dashed, with multiples of 10 using longer dashes (and multiples of 100 using longer ones yet). The dashes for adjacent values should be staggered, so that they don't simply from a solid vertical column (hiding data in the interval it spans). -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-4-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_GB.ISO-8859-15, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.ISO-8859-15 (charmap=ISO-8859-15) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages x11-apps depends on: ii cpp 4:4.1.1-15 The GNU C preprocessor (cpp) ii libc6 2.5-9+b1 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libfontconfig1 2.4.2-1.2 generic font configuration library ii libice6 1:1.0.3-2 X11 Inter-Client Exchange library ii libpng12-0 1.2.15~beta5-2 PNG library - runtime ii libsm6 2:1.0.3-1 X11 Session Management library ii libx11-6 2:1.0.3-7 X11 client-side library ii libxaw7 1:1.0.3-3 X11 Athena Widget library ii libxcursor1 1:1.1.8-2 X cursor management library ii libxext6 1:1.0.3-2 X11 miscellaneous extension librar ii libxft2 2.1.12-2 FreeType-based font drawing librar ii libxkbfile1 1:1.0.4-1 X11 keyboard file manipulation lib ii libxmu6 1:1.0.3-1 X11 miscellaneous utility library ii libxmuu1 1:1.0.3-1 X11 miscellaneous micro-utility li ii libxrender1 1:0.9.2-1 X Rendering Extension client libra ii libxt6 1:1.0.5-3 X11 toolkit intrinsics library ii x11-common 1:7.2-5 X Window System (X.Org) infrastruc x11-apps recommends no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
