Question on multi core monitoring

Well I made the switch to Mac last weekend (gotta like tax free weekend ) and I only wish I had done it sooner. I absolutly love the OS X interface. Im typing from my MacBook right now.

Now my question is, does anyone know of a program I can use to monitor the usage of the two cores in my Core 2 Duo processor? Iv been googling and used forum search but didn't find anything.

Thanks.

You might start with the Activity Monitor. It's in the Utilities folder in Applications. At the bottom of the AM window if click CPU you'll get a dynamic chart of your cores' activity. Double clicking the chart will enlarge the chart.

I use MenuMeters. It puts icons in your menu bar that can monitor CPU usage, network throughput, and ram usage as well.

I don't see the need for these programs.

Dronac said:

...

Now my question is, does anyone know of a program I can use to monitor the usage of the two cores in my Core 2 Duo processor? Iv been googling and used forum search but didn't find anything.

Thanks.

Click to expand...

Congrats on the purchase

You might want to take a look at iStat Pro. With this you can see the CPU usage when you check the Dashboard as well as a few other things.

The need is for when your machine is locking up and you don't know why...

A) Is/are my CPU/s pinned? = it's just busy working on something hard
B) Is the hard drive showing lots of activity?
b1) is ram maxed out as well? = swapping vram, buy more ram
C) ...etc...

Thanks for the responses everyone. MenuMeters was exactly what I was looking for.

The reason I wanted a monitor is that I wanted to observe the load distribution over multiple cores. I also have been using CPU monitors on my Windows machines to watch out for processes jumping up to 100% usage (usually svchost) and I like to know what item in my PC is causing a lockup.

I find CPU meters to be invaluable. There are two simple and usually visible symptoms of things going awry on your machine - your CPU load is not what you expect and/or you have internet traffic that you were not expecting. MenuMeters lets you see both of these indicators (and many more too) in real time, unobtrusively tucked onto your Menu bar. Absolutely invaluable!