Tload

Runs in a terminal and displays a text-only “graph” of current system load averages, garnered from /proc/loadavg. It is part of the base installation on most GNU/Linux systems (comes under procps package). Which is extremely useful for watching a system’s performance over SSH, often within a GNU Screen session.

The only trouble is, it’s not really obvious what the graph means. The man page isn’t terribly helpful; it just says tload gets its numbers from the /proc/loadavg file, and there’s no man page for that file.

SYNOPSIS

tload [-V] [-s scale] [ -d delay ] [tty]

Tload Options

The -s scale option allows a vertical scale to be specified for the display (in characters between graph ticks); thus, a smaller value represents a larger scale, and vice versa.

The -d delay sets the delay between graph updates in seconds.