By default the Gnome frequency scaling applet does not vary the frequency of the CPU. If your computer supports frequency scaling then the gnome panel applet can server quite useful. The only requirement is to reconfigure the applet to operate with root permissions:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets
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In the Debian repositories is sensors-applet. Its a Gnome panel application comparable to computertemp. Install with:
sudo apt-get install sensors-applet
Most likely this package is also in Ubuntu repositories, and possibly in further upstream distributions.
Once installed right click on your top gnome panel and select “Add to Panel”. Select “Hardware Sensors Monitor”, and a quaint icon will appear on your Gnome panel.
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The Gnome system monitor applet is an excellent graphical tool to determine relative system stability. You should enable this applet in your host operating system specifically if you are utilizing a virtual server environment. On your host system you need free RAM so that your guest OS will have free RAM to access. If your host OS is full, including the cache, it will cause system instability in your guest OS.
I have observed that my virtual server becomes unstable when the system cache completely consumes all available RAM. This is a result of a direct FTP or SSH connection, and is most likely a reasonably expected phenomena. While the caching feature allows for substantial speed improvement for FTP and SSH file transfers, the repercussion on virtual appliance stability is undersired. As posted previously, the simple resolution is to reboot the host system 
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