1Percenter

I was tempted to add MenuMeters to the “VPZtms Compendium of Tools” post because if I’d added it (and Growl), the list would have included all the applications that I am always running on my machine. I refrained because technically they have nothing to do with information management. But I still wanted to write something about system monitors.

Quicksilver users often say they feel crippled when using a machine that doesn’t have Quicksilver installed. I feel the same way when I use a machine that doesn’t have a menu bar system monitor installed. To me it is like driving a car without a dashboard. Sure, you can guesstimate how fast you’re going just by looking out the window, but what a waste of mental energy that a dashboard just solves.

When is a System Monitor Helpful?

These are questions that come up while you use a computer that a system monitor can answer.

1. Are you really downloading or uploading anything?

   This is particularly helpful when uploading to a website, since web uploads often don’t give any visual feedback as they happen. It is also helpful when loading a web page is just plain slow.

2. Can my computer handle opening another application right now?

   An implication of multithreading is that if you start to open two applications simultaneously, then they will both take longer to finish opening than if you had opened them successively. This is because the more threads you have running, the more of your system resources are devoted to the act of juggling the threads rather than the threads themselves.

   The same rule applies if you open an application while your computer is already working hard. Basically, the more you tell your computer to do at once, the longer it will take to do everything. (In addition, from my personal experience, overburdening a computer increases its likelihood of crashing.)

   Managing your system resources effectively means not starting new processor intensive tasks when your computer is already working hard.

3. Is the application process that you believe is happening, really happening?

   Encoding video and music, creating archives, and copying large files are all tasks that take a long time and don’t always give good visual feedback. Progress bars, if they are even present, sometimes stop moving even though stuff is still happening. A quick glance at a system monitor tells you if your computer is really doing anything. Another advantage of checking this way is that it doesn’t require finding the process’s window.

How to Configure your System Monitor

There are three pieces of information that I find useful to have my system monitor tell me:

1. Upload and Download Rates
2. Total Processor Usage
3. Number of RAM Pageouts (With all the memory management voodoo modern operating systems do, the actual used/free RAM numbers don’t seem useful to me.)

With MenuMeters configured to show this information, it should look something like this: