See CPU use history as a graph in a Linux shell

Question

I am looking for a free program that can display the CPU use history as a graph in a Linux shell, as bmon (sudo apt-get install -y bmon) can do network use per network interface.

or like Microsoft Windows's resource monitor can display:

top and htop only display the current CPU use.

---

sar (System Activity Report) (system monitor command used to report on various system loads, including CPU activity, memory/paging, device load, network. Linux distributions provide sar through the sysstat package.) is nice (sudo apt-get install -y systat) but I'd prefer to have a graph:

Same for mpstats (sudo apt-get install -y systat), nice but no graph:

Ideally, the program would have an option to CPU use history per process. (i.e. we could choose the process ID to display)

Answer 1

You can use s-tui:

• free and open source (GNU General Public License v2.0, written in Python)
• allows to monitor CPU temperature, frequency, power and utilization in a graphical way from the terminal:

To install:

pip install s-tui

Answer 2

tload (from the procps package on Debian and Ubuntu) provides a basic system load graph:

You can set the scale with -s and the delay (in seconds) with -d.

Symbols:

• * represents the level of [load average],(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_%28computing%29).
• - defines the unities of load,
• = substitutes the "-" when the bar passes the line that marks the unit of the graph.

Annotated example:

------------------------------------- load 3

                     *  
                     **
--------------------====------------- load 2
    **             ******   **
   ******         *************
  *********       **************
--=========-------==============----- load 1
*************************************
*************************************
*************************************
************************************* load 0

sudo apt-get install -y procps

Answer 3

ttyload has a Debian package available.

(More screenshots)

ttyload shows an asterix graph of CPU usage averages taken 1 minute at a time in red, 5 minutes at a time in green, and 15 minutes at a time in blue -- all three on one grid. The bigger time slices help put momentary spikes in better perspective.