Comments on: Watch System Activity and CPU Usage from the Mac OS X Dock

By: Mac Setup: Dual Screen Mac Pro with Analog System Activity Meters(!)

Mac Setup: Dual Screen Mac Pro with Analog System Activity Meters(!) — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 21:56:03 +0000

[...] than watching system activity in Activity Monitor, have you ever wished you had physical analog meters on your desk that showed you what was going on [...]

By: Fishcake21

Fishcake21 — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:34:06 +0000

If you have Lion, then that is normal. Using the kernel’s multithreading technology it displays all cores as one (windows 8 does this as well).

One way to prove it is download something like handbrake and have it encode a movie, and you will notice it will surpass over 100 percent on the CPU cycles (for my 2011 macbook pro it went over 600, meaning it have approx 6-7 cores in use)

By: Come visualizzare sulla Dock utili informazioni su utilizzo della CPU, RAM e sull’attività del disco e della rete | iSpazio MAC

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 09:15:01 +0000

[...] Via | OSXDaily [...]

By: jk

jk — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 08:03:44 +0000

I use MenuMeters by Raging Menace. Very customisable. Displays in the menu bar rather than the dock, but provides details on pretty much anything you’d want to know.

By: Deocliciano

Deocliciano — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:36:38 +0000

THX!!!!

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:39:42 +0000

It shows up on my Core i5 MacBook Air as 4 cores despite being a dual core machine, I think in your case it might be interpreting your quad core as 8 cores due to hyperthreading (4 core + 2x hyperthreading) and there’s not enough room in the Dock icon to display 8 bars so it only displays 1. Activity is visible if you pegged the CPU hard enough, but consider that it’s reading 8 as 1 the overall load is dispersed widely across the 8 threads and therefore shows virtually no activity. Do something CPU intensive to verify this of course, but you can also select the Monitors > CPU Usage to display a floating window which will display each CPU core use.

By: Luc VN

Luc VN — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:17:35 +0000

Strange, I have a quad core i7 Macbook Pro and I can only see 1 core displayed and not 4 cores as in your article.
On top of that there is no activity whatsoever in the graphical representation in the dock.
Are there any other parameters to look for?

 Mac OS X 10.7.3 Lion
 Macbook Pro 15″ 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7

By: JohnM

JohnM — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:26:52 +0000

Neat tip and it suits the blog.

However I find using Geektool (free) and a few scripts (found online) better – I currently have CPU usage monitored, memory usage (& found through this that something I use or OSX itself has a memory leak, and hard disk usage