ttyload is a lightweight utility which is intended to offer a color-coded graph of load averages over time on Linux and other Unix-like systems. It enables a graphical tracking of system load average in a terminal (“tty“).

It is known to run on systems such as Linux, IRIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, MacOS X (Darwin) and Isilon OneFS. It is designed to be easy to port to other platforms, but this comes with some hard work.

Some of its notable features are: it uses fairly standard, but hard-coded, ANSI escape sequences for screen manipulation and colorization. And also comes with (but doesn’t install, or even build by default) a relatively self-contained load bomb, if you want to view how things work on an otherwise unloaded system.

Suggested Read: GoTTY – Share Your Linux Terminal (TTY) as a Web Application

In this article, we will show you how to install and use ttyload in Linux to view a color-coded graph of your system load average in a terminal.

How to Install ttyload in Linux Systems

On Debian/Ubuntu based distributions, you can install ttyload from the default system respositores by typing the following apt-get command.

$ sudo apt-get install ttyload

On Other Linux distributions you can install ttyload from the source as shown.

$ git clone https://github.com/lindes/ttyload.git
$ cd ttyload
$ make
$ ./ttyload
$ sudo make install

Once installed, you can start it by typing the following command.

$ ttyload

Note: To close the program simply press [Ctrl+C] keys.

You can also define the number of seconds in the interval between refreshes. Default value is 4, and the minimum is 1.

$ ttyload -i 5
$ ttyload -i 1

To run it in a monochrome mode which turns off ANSI escapes, use the -m as follows.

$ ttyload -m

To get the ttyload usage info and help, type.

$ ttyload -h 

Below are some of its important features yet to be added:

• Support for arbitrary sizing.
• Make an X front end using the same basic engine, to have “3xload”.
• Logging-oriented mode.

For more information, check out the ttyload Homepage: http://www.daveltd.com/src/util/ttyload/

Thats all for now! In this article, we showed you how to install and use ttyload in Linux. Write back to us via the comment section below.