3.8. FpLite

Load Indicator on the top right side of the center of the Front Panel contains a small applet called FpLite. In original CDE it was used to indicate desktop activity, but since on today's processors this tasks are short and almost immediate (specially with a good window manager such as FVWM), I find it better suited to show system load.

It has 10 micro-bars. When there is no load, all are yellow. Load grows from left to right. First 5 green bars, then 3 blue, 2 magenta, an after that it starts from the beginning with red bars. FpLite summarizes load of all CPUs on the system in a way that 1-minute load is divided with number of CPU cores, and then counted as such while displaying load with color micro-bars. Everything under 1 (internally 100) is yellow, green, blue and magenta, and after that it counts 10 red micro-bars. For example: on the system with 2 CPU cores, 1-minute load of 0.6 will be presented with 3 bars (0.6 / num-cores), load of 2.2 will be presented with one red bar etc ... on the system with four CPU cores load of 3 will be magenta on the two rightmost bars, and load of 4 or more will be red. Load of more than (numcpu * 10) will not be shown specially, but user gets an idea what is going on if FpLite is all red.

If clicked, it will call a function f_FpLiteClickAction which is by default set to safe defaults ([default terminal app] -e top). FpLite FvwmScript app uses a little portable python script getla1.py from /usr/local/libexec/nscde to obtain 1-minute load data.

Key F1 will bring this help text in browser. If Sun type keyboard is in use, Help key above FpLite has the same function as F1 on PC.