Gfilui

What is the command to get the cpu and memory usage for the last 5 minutes ?
I need to track the cpu and memory usage.

The uptime command lists load average for the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes:

$ uptime
 05:49:47 up 8:40, 1 user, load average: 3.38, 2.16, 1.87

The load needs to be divided by number of CPUs. For example my system is a quad core (4 CPUs) Hyper threading (2 threads per CPU) so I need to divide by 8. The 5 minute load average of 2.16 is really .27 or about 27%.

You can learn more here and here.

You might consider installing conky -- this is a highly configurable system monitoring app; among many-many other capabilities, it can display traveling bar graphs for CPU and RAM usage, which take several minutes to scroll the data off. For multiple cores, it can display the load on each core individually, or the whole CPU as an aggregate. Conky can also monitor system temperature sensors, hard disk and network traffic, uptime, and other things, and display the results in a staggering variety of text and graphic formats.

Learning to configure Conky can be a challenge, but Google will find all sorts of Conky config files you can install and modify to shorten the learning curve.

mpstat - Report processors related statistics.

Install with

sudo apt install sysstat

The following will report CPU statistics of the last 300s (5 minutes).

mpstat 300 1

The command will let you wait for 300s to collect the information. To always have instant statistics, you can make a small script to keep the command running.

while true; do
 mpstat 300 1 > tmpstat
 cp tmpstat laststat
done

Then cat laststat will give you the information. (via)