Expert’s Rating
Our Verdict
We ’ve cover a number of Gems for keeping an heart on your Mac ’s performance and activity , including MenuMeters , iPulse , and MemoryStick . I recently came across another utilitarian option , MiniUsage , which makes some activity entropy easily approachable via a piece of distance on your fare - bar .
With MiniUsage run , a small carte - bar display shows your pick of system - carrying into action data : CPU utilisation ( the percentage of your Mac ’s processing power that ’s currently in use ) , incoming connection datum charge per unit , outgoing net data rate , or ( on a laptop ) electric battery . or else , MiniUsage ’s display can rotate through these statistic , changing every few indorsement . You choose how often the statistic are updated , from every second to every five seconds .
get across on the MiniUsage menu , and the course of study show you a live - updated , grouped list of the processes using the most CPU resources , along with the percent of C.P.U. function for each ; you choose how many processes are exhibit , from one to 20 . This is a great way to quickly see which programs and processes are bogging down your Mac ’s processor(s ) . Snow Leopard users can even switch to a program by select its name from the MiniUsage menu .
( One bug here is that if a process ’s name includes a space , the 2d tidings of the name appear in the CPU - percentage field alternatively of that percentage . The procedure appears in the right locating in the list , but you do n’t see the literal CPU - usage number . )
If your Mac has multiple CPU or Congress of Racial Equality , the menu also displays what percentage of each kernel is currently being used ; mouse over a essence and a hierarchic menu shows how that usage is disunite between system- and user - level process .
The menu also displays the same connection - throughput data you’re able to opt to reckon in the menu legal profession , and mousing over the Detailed Information particular in the menu show you a pop - up persuasion of the outturn of thetop -l1shell program line ( as if you ’d entered that command in Terminal ) . regrettably , this display uses a relative font , rather than a monospace one , so it ’s about impossible to read — especially in Snow Leopard , where the output oftop -l1is already nearly useless .
Two bit of info I ’d wish to see in MiniUsage are memory usage ( total and by process , just as the program display CPU usage ) and the available space on each connected volume . But given that MiniUsage was unfreeze less than a month ago , it ’s a good bet the developer is already working on improving the program .
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