история использования ресурсов

имхо нужно курить в таким направлении - man watch && man top && man crontab

В ядре есть вот такая штука:

General setup->BSD Process Accounting

If you say Y here, a user level program will be able to instruct the                                                   
kernel (via a special system call) to write process accounting                                                          
information to a file: whenever a process exits, information about                                                      
that process will be appended to the file by the kernel.  The                                                           
information includes things such as creation time, owning user,                                                         
command name, memory usage, controlling terminal etc. (the complete                                                    
list is in the struct acct in <file:include/linux/acct.h>).  It is                                                      
up to the user level program to do useful things with this                                                              
information.  This is generally a good idea, so say Y.

Много тут говорилось о весьма полезной утилите от Intel - powertop (http://www.linuxpowertop.org/).

имхо у неё немного другая область применения...

PS: /me выражает признательность дядям из Интеля за предоставленную утилиту, которая помогла мне снизить энергопотребление ноута до 14-15 ватт.

apt-get install sysstat

Description: sar, iostat and mpstat - system performance tools for Linux
 The sysstat package contains the sar, mpstat, iostat
 sadf and sa tools for Linux.
 .
 The sar command collects and reports system activity
 information. The iostat command reports CPU utilization
 and I/O statistics for disks. The mpstat command reports
 global and per-processor statistics. The sadf command
 is used to display data collected by sar in various
 formats.
 .
 The statistics reported by sar concern I/O transfer rates,
 paging activity, process-related activities, interrupts,
 network activity, memory and swap space utilization, CPU
 utilization, kernel activities and TTY statistics, among
 others. Both UP and SMP machines are fully supported.
 .
 Homepage: http://perso.orange.fr/sebastien.godard/