The Bubbling Load Monitor (or "Bubblemon" for
short) is a system load monitor for the GNOME
panel. It looks like a vial containing water. The
water level indicates how much (electronic) memory
is in use. The color of the liquid indicates how
much swap space is used. The amount of bubbles
reflects the system CPU load. A message in a
bottle indicates there is unread mail. A reed-like
graph shows I/O load. On multi-core systems
the CPU with the highest load will bubble in the
middle, and the others on the sides, so it's
possible to see how well load gets distributed
between CPUs.