monitoring your physical resources on Ubuntu

Since I am working with a really heavy DBMS and IDE for a project, I start to ask me about my physical resources, RAM and Processor specifically, once I got a message from that DBMS that I had only 200 MB of RAM available and that was because that monster load a lot of subprocess -It's a Windows based DBMS, there are a lot of options better, but you know, the client always is right.

So, to monitor the resources you may use:

1. from command line: egrep --color 'Mem|Cache|Swap' /proc/meminfo

2. Use a really cool tool: gnome-system-monitor, you get a great graphs about used/free resources, really useful