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Monitor your system's vital functions with iPulse Apps
iPulse is perhaps the nicest graphical System Resource Monitor I've seen out there. In one eye-pleasing and easily interpreted display, it displays all of the following critical system information:
  • CPU activity (single and dual)
  • System load
  • Network activity
  • Memory activity and usage
  • Disk usage
  • Current time and date
The dock icon mimics the floating window display (which can have different levels of transparency set) if you'd rather conserve desk space. It's amazing how efficient UI design can result in a simple but comprehensive representation of your system activity within a single window or icon. This $10.00 bit of share ware looks and works like a million bucks.

P.S. I do not work for or know anyone at IconFactory. This is just a dammed nice piece of software.

[Editor's note: If you're interested in seeing what your system is up to at all times, iPulse is definitely an impressive little application. I tested it this morning, and it's a very professional app, with clear and easy to understand preferences, and it does have a very efficient display method for showing what the system is doing. My only real complaint is that it's a bit too CPU hungry for a system monitor. Configured as I might wish to use it, iPulse took up anywhere from 9% to 15% (according to 'top' in the Terminal) of the CPU cycles on my G4/733 ... that's just a bit too much for my needs, as I'd rather have that horsepower available for other applications. That small fact aside, iPulse is an impressive effort!]
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Monitor your system's vital functions with iPulse | 9 comments | Create New Account
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iPulse / top CPU usage
Authored by: Anonymous on Nov 25, '02 11:15:27AM

It is quite likely that iPulse displays the 'idle' CPU usage more as 'the CPU usage average as influenced by the moment of sampling'. Of course, sampling eats a bunch of CPU because the app is updating the UI and, as such, the CPU usage will be high.

Same reason why 'top' seems to eat 10% to 15% of the CPU even though it sleeps for 99/100s of a second.

Real world metrics show that neither app use as much CPU as they indicate. iPulse will certainly consume more than top simply because it (a) monitors more stuff and (b) gives graphical indication as to the status of the system in a fashion that uses transparency (a simple bar graph would use less CPU than top, most likely -- drawing a terminal window is expensive).



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iPulse / top CPU usage
Authored by: derrickbass on Nov 27, '02 04:02:09PM

To what real world metrics do you refer? I ran top on my PB G4 500 using
time top
At the end, time reported that top spent 1.46 seconds in user mode and 8.61 seconds in kernel mode out of 1:15 of real time, for 13.3% utilization, which is pretty much top had reported about itself. My real world metric implies top really is a CPU hog.



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trim monitor usage
Authored by: mervTormel on Nov 25, '02 06:40:58PM

you can trim these monitor's cycles by turning the update intervals up to something reasonable, like three seconds, e.g,

top -us3 10

trim out some of ipulse's monitors and it's very reasonable for the what it does, more reasonable than the top command above.



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CPU Usage
Authored by: stewby on Nov 26, '02 01:10:53AM

Also, if you aren't actually doing anything, then 10-15% is no big deal. 10-15% of barely any usage is still barely any usage.



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Menu bar version?
Authored by: endquote on Nov 26, '02 03:43:21AM

I once saw a screenshot of someone's system that had something indicating network usage in the menu bar, up near the clock. I thought that was really neat, but couldn't find anything that did that in VersionTracker. Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?



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Menu bar version?
Authored by: Wevah on Nov 26, '02 04:08:41AM
Might be Net Monitor.

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Menu bar version?
Authored by: froz on Nov 26, '02 05:05:42AM

Or it could be spy:

http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=12254&db=mac



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Menu bar version?
Authored by: MacMuse26 on Jul 24, '03 04:27:26PM

Menu Meters is an Open source implementation to display this type of information, lives in the menu bar, very politly too.

http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/index.html



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Monitoring from the menubar...
Authored by: pknull on Jul 25, '03 10:53:10AM

I personally use menumeters for this information. I've had seceral dock and window based versions, but I could never figure out where to put it on screen...



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