Instead of watching it in 'top', I recommend installing munin: http://munin-monitoring.org/ http://munin-monitoring.org/ The blurb from that site: Munin is a

Instead of watching it in 'top', I recommend installing munin: http://munin-monitoring.org/ http://munin-monitoring.org/ The blurb from that site: Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.