Apparently these are the big offenders! App Tamer Controls By App For example, how often have you realized that your machine has slowed to a crawl because Spotlight has decided to index? With App Tamer, you can limit that usage to less than 20%.Īpp Tamer comes pre-configured to automatically reduce the CPU and battery usage of Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, Spotlight, Time Machine, Photoshop, Illustrator, Word and more. The magic of App Tamer is that it lets you limit how much CPU you want to allow each app to use. At the bottom of the listing is a button to toggle to see all processes, but it can get pretty long and doesn’t necessarily provide you with more actionable information. It’s a little hard to figure out whether it’s sorted by the instantaneous percentage or the average percentage usage because both are displayed but I’ve seen the top apps have one or the other as the top value. If you don’t have an 8-core system you won’t need to worry your pretty little head about it, David.īelow the graph is a list of all processes currently using CPU and sorted by that CPU usage. I was surprised to see an option on my new Mac that said, “Because your Mac has more than four processor cores, the CPU graph will show more detail when setting to a logarithmic scale.” As much as I enjoy annoying David Roth with mathematics, rather than going through a full explanation of what logarithms are, let’s just say that using a log scale is helpful if you have small values and large values you need to plot on the same graph. The top of the app shows you a graph of your CPU usage as a function of time. You can tear it off to make it a standalone app and even set it to hover above other apps using the preferences. When you select the icon the app flips down pinned in place. On first run of App Tamer, like many apps nowadays, it will ask to install a helper app in order to function.īy default, App Tamer shows you an icon in the menu bar and the current percentage of total CPU usage. There’s a free, 15-day trial of App Tamer at /…. App Tamer is a menu bar app and costs $15. Clair Software gives you metrics on CPU usage but it also gives you practical actions you can take to control your apps, e.g. The information is actionable, but you have to go to another app to take action.Īpp Tamer from St. But there’s nothing you can actually do about it from within iStat Menus. You can watch your CPU get chewed up to your heart’s content. I’m a huge fan of metrics as you may have already figured out, and there’s nothing more fun than looking at all of the graphs and numbers in the menubar app iStat Menus. App Tamer Could Help App Tamer Showing Running Apps There can be times when you’d like to limit an app or a specific process from taking too much CPU because you’re doing something else demanding, such as recording or broadcasting video. Let’s say your apps aren’t misbehaving and your hardware is brand-spanking new. A common answer to questions regarding battery drain on tech support shows is, “are you using Chrome?” I haven’t independently verified this by personal testing, but Chrome is known to have memory leaks and not work as efficiently on Macs as Safari which is tailored for Apple-specific hardware. Sure we can add more RAM and we can throw in an SSD and dramatically increase the speed, but a demanding app can burn through an aging battery pretty quickly.Įven if you have a newer machine, misbehaving apps can burn through a new battery and chew up your processors, bringing your system to a crawl. I bring this all up because as the demands on our machines increase, we need ways to limit the power required to keep them running well. That means a machine a decade old is still a great machine. As of right now, macOS High Sierra is still supported with security updates, and you can run High Sierra on Macs back to 2009 or 2010 depending on the model. I hear stories about people using Core 2 Duo machines that are 12 years old! I’m not a big fan of recommending letting a Mac that’s not able to run a currently supported operating system get on the Internet, but luckily Apple supports machines pretty darn far back. One of the coolest things about being a Mac owner is how long your computer will remain useful.
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