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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

This is because since macOS Catalina Activity Monitor did something to itself to make itself spend half a core just updating its table view and literally nobody who works on it (which I suspect is <1 person) understands that a monitoring tool that uses more CPU than the thing it is meant to monitor is absurd. I have seriously considered rewriting it multiple times and if the app stays like it is one day I probably will.

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Please do! I like Mac, but I yearn a quality of 1st and 3rd party Windows tools. Task manager is nicely readable and lightweight, and process explorer is a godsend.

Meanwhile Activity Monitor updates once per 30 seconds when the system is under load.

Agreed! I recently used Windows for the first time in years, and was impressed by two of the built in monitoring programs. It was dead simple to actually get a global view of all file system activity and the processes responsible. Mac’s first party "fs_usage" tool is far less usable. As an example, there’s no way to prevent it from truncating long paths.

Any reason you don’t use a terminal tool like htop?

I do use htop occasionally; however, I am not really a fan of keeping around a terminal for something that could be a well-integrated native app. Plus htop is missing a lot of information Activity Monitor has, as well as the ability to do things like run sample or spindump.

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