I am working on a way of monitoring if my machine´s preformance since I am afraid the cpu wont be sufficient for the work its supposed to do..

What I basically wanto do is make some form of script/program/crontab job that:
1) gets current CPU-load (total all users), mem-usage and swap-usage
2) opens a file, puts this at last line, saves the file..

Then i can show this very nicely on some webpage using php or the like.

So I pretty much need help with what commands to use or how, then throwing it in a file for easier handling.

Think there's a command(s) that give that info. Perhaps do:
apropos load
or the like to find it.

Then write a script, something like:

#! /bin/sh
# say 'loadstat' is the name of the command.

loadstat >> my_load_statistics_file.txt

Then make it executable and put it on your PATH.

No expert but should work.

Aha there you go, putting the info into a file seemed a bit easier then I expected, all that is left is the nifty command that gives me all the info I need.. the search continues

note: ive found that uptime seems to give 3 values after "load average", but havent had time to read more about this, could be the golden command if its cpu and mem-usage, then that could be enough for me

Thanks lugoteehalt !

Edit: seems uptime only gives you cpu-usage, no mem or swap stats.

Did you try "top"? Top shows a lot of info.
But with top you will need some special arguments in order to make it behave correctly. Top won't exit until you tell him to exit. So, you have to issue the number of iterations top will perform.
Try:
top -n 1 >> topinfo.txt

Using two > chars, the command will append the new text into the file, whitout erasing the current content. Using only one, top will erase all prior content and paste new, each time you run the script. (like this: top -n 1 > topinfo.txt)

Hope it helps!

I think top takes a bit to much out of the cpu, if I "run" it, without the -n 1, it takes about 0.1-20% cpu, I dont want something going off every 5th minute causing any form of preformance-decrease...

Maybe if I can get it to show without the actual PID-info and just the interesting info at the "top" () it will be very nice, from that I can just extract anything I want/need since its all there!

man top here I come

If you run top without the -n 1 option, top won't exit. It's of no use to a text file.

The following command produces top suitable for a text file and pulls off the top five lines:

top -b n 1|egrep 'average|zombie|nice|shrd|Swap'

There is a ??bug in my version of top so that the cpu usuage line's while usefull doesn't really make sence. Subsequent itterations, n 2, are allright.

If you have sysstat installed you could use sar
blink@insanity ~--> sar -u 10 5
Linux 2.4.20-30.9 (insanity) 05/14/2004

09:33:39 AM CPU %user %nice %system %idle
09:33:49 AM all 9.70 0.10 1.20 89.00
09:33:59 AM all 7.40 0.10 0.50 92.00
09:34:09 AM all 8.30 0.40 1.20 90.10
09:34:19 AM all 6.60 0.20 0.70 92.50
09:34:29 AM all 18.50 0.00 0.90 80.60
Average: all 10.10 0.16 0.90 88.84
blink@insanity ~-->

sar -u (delay) (times to report)