CPU Usage

Description

This application shows the current CPU usage in a floating square meter:

This information is useful for determining how hard your computer is being worked. Your computer may behave slowly or run hot when the processor is being worked hard.

The text is completely transparent, and the opacity of the meter's background is directly tied to the CPU usage (for example, the backdrop of the meter above is 63% opaque). Also, if you have more than one processor, the meter will have multiple cells, and in each one, the CPU number will be shown below the percentage.

When the application is frontmost, the meter has a completely-opaque border, and you can drag the meter around with the mouse. When the application is not frontmost, the border is hidden, and mouse events will fall through to whatever's below the meter.

You can configure the background color, the size of every cell, and the orientation (for multiple-CPU machines):

This application requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. It is a universal binary, so it will run natively on either an Intel-based Mac or a PowerPC-based Mac.

Beta software

This is version 0.3. It is not a final release. However, there are no known bugs.

Please contact me with bug reports. (Contact information is in the ReadMe included with the software.)

Next version

Coming in version 0.4:

• The optional ability to display the CPU usage in the Dock icon, in addition to or instead of the floating window

Version history

Fixed in version 0.3:

• The application gushed memory (approx. 10 K per second, according to top) because host_processor_info (the function that returns the accumulated CPU usage numbers) allocates a new array in memory, and I was not calling vm_deallocate on that array.

• The application is now multi-threaded.

  The theory behind this is that OS X's scheduler may distribute the threads between the various processors in the machine, so that a multi-processor Mac will be using each of its processors to draw one of the views.

  Probing the CPU usage still happens on the main thread. This means that one of the CPUs is still getting a little more work than the others. There's nothing that I can do about that.

Fixed in version 0.2:

• The orientation control didn't work (highlighting was broken).

• The background color control didn't work (probably happened when I changed it over to Bindings).

Version 0.1 was the first release.

Downloads

CPU Usage 0.3.dmg

The application, on a bzip2-compressed UDIF disk image.
128-bit FNV1 hash: c2602dcc6df10bf4c1fb58bef2133c53
MD5 hash: cd59c17c2df8c2910881694540b1ba0f
SHA-1 hash: 1d506859a10f9c786e07087c55efc1449d2cb57e

CPU Usage 0.3-source.tbz

Objective-C source code and an Xcode 2.3 project (as well as the application used to generate the icon), in a bzip2ed tarball.
128-bit FNV1 hash: 5372ddd8e3742f9b7803361b12581d99
MD5 hash: 69e6ee476a2137da00c284975dd0ea26
SHA-1 hash: ea2c31d079f2dea6dabc331cc352398dd5cd4152

CPU Usage 0.2.dmg

The application, on a bzip2-compressed UDIF disk image.
128-bit FNV1 hash: 0635fdf6f58519d8cf009c2e914bface
MD5 hash: c71b43d33d4686df513254c979436d10
SHA-1 hash: 5a5ecd2df8d3108a5fcd5f7dfa4fd9e8d300bbf1

CPU Usage 0.2-source.tbz

Objective-C source code and an Xcode 2.3 project (as well as the application used to generate the icon), in a bzip2ed tarball.
128-bit FNV1 hash: b1d862907b701175f5f8c171a07749ee
MD5 hash: 2242c6ede857a38f92efdf92eb70f009
SHA-1 hash: 31685e52e153554a2efe3891601913d4d02d5e16

CPU Usage 0.1.dmg

The application, on a bzip2-compressed UDIF disk image.
128-bit FNV1 hash: 8a3c69732f139a2c9907a307243c06ff
MD5 hash: 5801f36273dac933637263808de5ef8b
SHA-1 hash: 034b19fd5298f0284be017820e971a961cc6d9ed

CPU Usage 0.1-source.tbz

Objective-C source code and an Xcode 2.3 project (as well as the application used to generate the icon), in a bzip2ed tarball.
128-bit FNV1 hash: ced3f3e287c34e13356ebb98c51da8e9
MD5 hash: a8d34a9274f7e81679d92fc73f6b6b53
SHA-1 hash: bf9f03ba4c9778c566c5f9cad51660a4c16f02d1

MD5 and SHA1 signatures were created using the md5sum(1) and sha1sum(1) utilities from GNU coreutils.

2006-06-24 http://oocities.com/iamtheboredzo/cpuusage