ProcessWizard - Control app priorities from the menubar

Dec 09, '02 09:26:18AM

Contributed by: robg

ProcessWizard iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]

If you like to mess around with your applications' UNIX 'nice' values, which control how the system prioritizes time amongst the running tasks, you might want to check out ProcessWizard. Although I covered this back in January, I felt it was time to give it a turn as the Pick of the Week.

ProcessWizard puts an icon in your menu bar that, when clicked, opens a window showing all of your running applications and their current 'nice' values. You can also switch the display to show background apps, other user processes, and non-user (system) processes such as cron, etc. Next to each icon and item name is a slider; move it to the right to increase the priority level of any item; move it left to decrease the priority level. You can authenticate each time you do this, or click the unlock icon to allow changes without re-entering a password. You can even kill any process by control-clicking on its name or icon.

ProcessWizard isn't perfect; it'd be nice if it remembered your settings for each application, and if it had a "default" button to quickly return an app to a normal setting. Still, it's hard to beat its functionality for $0, and I found a couple of interesting things just by looking at some of the background tasks (for example, my Wacom tablet driver is 'niced' well above normal by default).

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