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alhelal
Asked: 2018-07-19 00:23:35 +0800 CST

How do I show memory usage information in top bar or as notification?

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I have 4GB RAM. When I open Firefox, IntelliJ IDEA or VS Code and some other application my memory is about used up thus my machine hangs and I can't do anything. I can't even close any applications.

Date and time are shown in the top bar so that I can view it any time without any thing typing.

If I would view memory status in this way without typing anything then I can make a decision whether to open an application or whether this application may put my machine in hanging state or not.

Is it possible in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS?

notification panel gnome-shell memory-usage 18.04

6 Answers

  1. You may try a GNOME shell extension called "system-monitor". It does

    Display system informations in gnome shell status bar, such as memory usage, cpu usage, network rates…

    enter image description here

    "system-monitor" depends on a few packages. To install them, run

    sudo apt install gir1.2-gtop-2.0 gir1.2-networkmanager-1.0 gir1.2-clutter-1.0

    Then log out and log in again.

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  2. Best Answer

    As pointed out in the other post you want to install the Gnome Shell Extension system-monitor There's a browser plugin and integrations that can allow you to install it from the browser or from the software center as mentioned by @pomsky.

    However I've found that the easiest way to install it is to just install it from apt using the debian package

    sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor

    This will also pull in all the required dependencies, and after a reboot or log out the system monitor was in the top task bar.

    enter image description here

    (Note that I think I enabled the swap manually before taking the screenshot.)

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  3. Based on my experience, there are 2 packages required:

    1. gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor
    2. gnome-tweaks

    Luckily, these 2 can be installed easily with the following command:

    sudo apt install gnome-tweaks gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor

    Open Tweaks, navigate to the Extensions tab, ensure that extensions in general are enabled, and then find "System-monitor" in the list on the same tab, and enable it.

    enter image description here

    That's it, problem solved. No reboot required in my case. This is also tested on Ubuntu 20.04

    However, if the system-monitor does not appear in Tweaks > Extensions, reboot the laptop and it should be there after that.

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  4. In Ubuntu 18.04 (assuming you're using the default gnome desktop at least) run the gnome Tweaks app. Everything you need to manage for that is there, including what exactly you'd like to see from gnome system-monitor on the dock bar, which you can configure through the settings icon near the on/off switch for system-monitor seen below.

    enter image description here

    Unfortunately the extension doesn't really fit the dock's default color so it might be a little ugly when you configure to see graphs and not digit values there. So I ended up configuring to show the digit value only for now.

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  5. TLDR

    1. sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor
    2. gnome-extensions enable [email protected]
    3. Sort of restart, but as Tully says, only gnome shell needs to.

    I've just refined this on my third Ubuntu 20.04, and did it on 18.04 way back in 2018/2019.

    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor

    I tried logging out and in and even rebooted all to no effect.

    What worked was (instead of gnome-tweaks, which sounds Kev-ish):

    gnome-extensions enable [email protected]

    I discovered this from the author's README (where they are calling the tool an "applet"):

    Enable it with gnome-tweak-tool or gnome-shell-extension-tool [email protected]

    and playing with that command (because writing someone else's email sounds like an exfiltration risk).

    On previous attempts I had already restarted and could just issue some CLI voodoo (actually the enable step from the TLDR, though substituting info indicated enable would be needed) to have the graphs magically appear:

    My top bar after enable

    You won't see this yet if you don't sort of restart. What I did was open a text only terminal with Ctrl-Alt-F3 and requested it to restart display-manager. After some glitches where my password entries looped back to me via a black screen a couple of times I was in.

    Was all my stuff still running? Probably not! But I had saved or shut it down.

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  6. In Ubuntu 21.04 you have to install Google Chrome and the chrome extension for Gnome Shell extensions to install the system monitor extension.

    You can go to https://extensions.gnome.org/ and then install the chrome plugin and then view any of the gnome extensions in chrome and then enable or disable the extension from the browser itself.

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