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This article is part 6 of an ongoing series of articles on this site comparing Apple Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" to Red Hat Linux Fedora Core 4 (FC4). (The previous article is here.) The point of this comparison is not to say that one OS or the other is "better" but rather to point out the differences and indicate where an artist who previously used Mac OS X 10.4 would find Linux to be easier, harder, or the same to use as the Mac. See the introduction article for more information and links to the other articles in the series. Although the focus of this series is on the needs of designers, artists, and content creators, the content should be relevant to any number of Mac users or Linux users.
In the big scheme of things, activity monitoring is not a huge issue for Mac users. They've grown accustomed to an "it just works" mindset and rarely, if ever, take the time to bring up a system monitor and see what's going on. Mac power users, however, pay attention to available memory, page swaps, and other such performance statistics to get a clue how they can get more out of their hardware and software investment.
OS X's Activity Monitor Below is Apple's Activity Monitor in Mac OS X: 
From this interface, it's possible for a Mac user to monitor a number of vital performance statistics, including the following: - Total CPU usage by all processes running on the system
- The percentage of CPU being used by processes in the user space
- The percentage of CPU being used by processes in the system space
- The percentage of CPU being used by tasks that have been "niced"
- The percentage of CPU resources lying idle
- The number of threads in use
- The number of processes running
- For each running process, its process ID number, process name, current CPU usage, what user it's running under, the number of threads it's using, how much real memory it's consuming, and how much virtual memory it's consuming
- The current amount of system memory that is free, "wired" (can't be paged to disk), active, inactive, and in use
- The size of the virtual memory file
- The number of page ins/outs
- How many disk reads in and out have occurred
- The number of reads in and out per second
- How much data has been read from disk
- How much data has been written to disk
- How much data has been read/written per second
- How much space is in use and free on each disk volume
- How many network packets have come in and gone out
- How many network packets are coming in and going out per second
- How much data has been sent and received via the network
- How much data has been send and received per second
- Processes can be displayed for only the current user, all users, and a variety of other variations (e.g., administrator processes, inacive processes, etc.)
Using this performance information, a user experiencing a performance problem can isolate the cause of that problem and determine corrective action (e.g., terminate the applicaiton, restart the process, and so forth).
Red Hat Linux System Monitor
Over time, Linux users tend to become much more skilled technicians (generally speaking) than Macintosh users. As a result, monitoring processes and system activity is perhaps a more critical function on Linux than on OS X (or at least it's a more-utilized function, I would imagine). So it's no surprise that Linux includes a System Monitor of its own: 
Red Hat System Monitor Graph Tab
Red Hat System Monitor Processes Display
Red Hat System Monitor Memory Map Display for a Process
Red Hat System Monitor Open Files Display for a Process
Like its Macintosh counterpart, the Red Hat System Monitor provides a good deal of performance information, including:
- Current CPU usage
- User memory usage and capacity
- Used swap space
- Devices, their filesystem type, total size, free space, and used space
- For each running process, its name, the user who initiated it, its current status, the amount of memory it's using, its virtual memory size, its resident memory size, its shared memory size, its RSS memory, X Server memory usage, percentage of CPU used, Nice priority level, process ID, security context, and the command line arguments used to invoke it
- Display only the current user's processes, only active processes, or all processes
- Processes can be hidden, and hidden processes can be made visible
- The memory map for a process can be displayed
- The files open by a particular process can be displayed
Unlike the Macintosh Activity Monitor, the Red Hat System Monitor doesn't display network usage statistics, disk activity statistics, or virtual memory page statistics (though it does graph them).
Again, I may have missed something, but I was unable to identify a GUI-based network activity monitor from the items available in the Red Hat FC4 GUI menus. This is a minor but noteworthy deficiency if I didn't miss it.
Still, there is a much greater wealth of information available about processes from Red Hat's monitor than Apple's. I find both to be equally accessible and simple enough to work with, though the sheer depth of information available through the Linux activity monitor shows me just how much I still have to learn about that operating system's inner workings. The good news in that is that Linux is ready for me when my skills hit that level. With OS X, I guess I'd be digging in the command line looking for whatever information Apple offers that isn't in the Activity Monitor.
The Verdict
From the strict point of view of process monitoring, I give the nod to Linux. System Monitor is more than adequate to that task and is far more capable than Apple's Activity Monitor in OS X 10.4.
On the other hand, I would like to be able to see the network activity levels on the system sometimes, and that does not appear to be something Linux could show me. In that respect, I'd have to say Linux has a little catching up to do with Mac OS X (and Windows XP for that matter) here.
Overall, I'm going to call it a tie. Linux provides more detailed process monitoring information, as well as the ability to change priority for a process, but it lacks network activity monitoring. OS X has a wider scope of monitoring options, but doesn't have the depth of process monitoring that Linux does. Both sides' advantages are roughly equal in value in my mind. There are times I'd like to know more about what a process is doing than Apple will tell me, and times I'd like to see what network activity is happening that Linux isn't telling me. From the point of view of a Mac user switching to Linux, I think they'd find most of the monitoring information they want, aside from network monitoring. I don't know how much a graphic artist would really care about that, so I'm taking the point of view that they could live without it if need be, so Linux isn't going to present them a problem here. Stay tuned for the next installment in this series, in which we examine setting up a networked UNIX printer on both OS X and Linux.
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