A macOS system monitor in your menu bar | Hacker News Reader

A macOS system monitor in your menu bar

github.com

46 pointsfeross15 comments

what does this do that Menumeters does not?

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10451/menumeters

Menumeters provides their own reasoning as to why you might want to use Stats instead here: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters#other-versions--relat...

It is written in Swift, would be one thing.

This is cool. Looks like an OSS version of iStat Menus that I use.

Why do people need to monitor their desktop or laptop resource?

It's not like servers that are unattended but you're right there and know what's running.

It's just a distraction that doesn't gain any actionable intel unless you're running some weird or buggy apps that consume more resources than they should.

If you must check, there's always the official monitor app.

I do run servers on my Mac OS, and also buggy apps (mine), so Developers like me loves this app!

> unless you're running some weird or buggy apps that consume more resources than they should

ahh, to live in a world where this caveat wasn't the norm

For me, the point is not constant active monitoring but being able to see when some application runs away with my system resources.

At a glance network monitoring is also very handy — I can check if an application is absolutely chewing through data (or quietly not actually doing anything at all), which is quite useful for metered connections.

I find it bizarre that some people want to have system metrics displayed all the time on their desktop. What for? Open the system monitor app when you want to check something, close it when you don't.

With SSDs and quiet fans you don't hear when your computer is thrashing or when a process got out of control. You only notice when it is too late and when you use an app it slows to a crawl. Sometimes so bad that hard rebooting is faster than waiting for the app to quit. I had this a couple of times recently on Windows with Outlook or Firefox. A decade ago I regularly had this on Mac, haven't used one in a while but I guess it is rarer there.

For me it's because I keep an eye on how things perform.

Sometimes I see weird CPU spikes or memory leaks and report them. It basically replaces the old indicator lights for me but in a much better way.

Third party alternates report more detailed data and keep more useful history when running. They’re just part of the debugging process, as a user. Most can be configured to display minimal information in the menu bar.

but why do you need them displayed all the time? I notice every time I open the Monitor app, itself actually consumes the most CPU. There must be some cost to constantly querying these system metrics when you don't actually look at them all that much.

I'm saying you don't, if you don't want to see them. Usually there's some menu bar icon that's configurable. But you do want to keep them running for the history and for the quick accessibility.

There is indeed a performance cost. My experience is the good third party options are less resource intensive than the system option, but YMMW and there are a lot of options out there making all kinds of tradeoffs.

That said, there are definitely people who want to run a powerful and GUI-rich system stats tool and don't mind seeing graphs in the corner of their eye all day and giving up 5% of resources to run it. I'd venture most of us are running something that another person doesn't see the point in using.

TG Pro does this as well

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