# Chapter 3. Onscreen Fundamentals

After starting KTimemon a small window will appear displaying information gathered from the operating system. If you move the mouse pointer over the KTimemon window and let it rest for a small amount of time, a tool-tip (i.e. a small transient window) will appear. The tool-tip contains numeric information about the system parameters displayed by the bar graphs. Tool-tips can be disabled (refer to Configuration).

# 3.1. Display Modes

KTimemon can display two different sets of system information. As explained in the Configuration chapter, mouse buttons can be bound to various actions. Per default, the left mouse button is bound to the mode switch action, i.e. by clicking the left mouse button anywhere in the KTimemon window, the displayed information switches from "Normal Mode" (the default) to "Extended Mode", and vice versa.

## 3.1.1. Normal Mode

After starting KTimemon for the first time, it will show information about the current CPU activity, as well as memory and swap usage. Three bar graphs are used to show this information; they are updated regularly (the default sample interval is 0.5s, but it can be changed, see Configuration). The three bar graphs represent (from left to right):

CPU usage.

  KTimemon shows the bar in three different colours, representing CPU time spent in various modes. From bottom to top they are: kernel mode, user mode, and user mode with lowered priority (nice) - since Solaris does not seem to support statistics for nice mode, the topmost part of the bar represents time spent in the wait state on such systems. The gap from the top of the bar to the top of the window represents the percentage the CPU idle time.

Memory usage.

  Similar to the CPU usage bar, this bar is composed of three sub fields, representing (from bottom to top): memory allocated by processes, memory used for I/O buffering, and memory used for file caching. For Digital Unix based systems, the middle section represents "inactive" memory (i.e. memory allocated and not used for a certain amount of time), and for Solaris based systems, the middle section of the bar is not used, and the topmost section represents the amount of memory used by the kernel. Again, the gap from the top of the bar to the top of the window represents free memory.

Swap usage.

  This bar consists of a single field representing the current swap usage relative to the system's total amount of swap space.

Clicking the mouse button bound to "mode switch" in the KTimemon window switches to "Extended Mode".

## 3.1.2. Extended Mode

In this mode, the three bar graphs are used to display a different set of system information. Again from left to right, they show:

Paging activity.

  This bar consists of two parts, the lower half of which shows the number of memory pages written to secondary storage in the last sample interval. Similarly, the upper half indicates the number of pages read from secondary storage.

Swapping activity.

  The second bar displays the analogue information for swap activity.

Context switches.

  Again, this bar graph consists of a single field which indicates the number of context switches in the last sample interval.

Since there is no "natural" way of scaling the information shown in "Extended Mode", by default KTimemon uses autoscaling (explained in the Common Questions Section). There is, however, the possibility of specifying the scaling information, see the Configuration section.

Note that the two sets of bar graphs share the same colours, i.e. the colours setup for "Normal Mode" is also used for displaying information in "Extended Mode" (see also Configuration on how to change the colour scheme).