Stats – macOS system monitor in your menu bar | Hacker News Reader

Stats – macOS system monitor in your menu bar

github.com

450 pointsLeoPanthera168 comments

I've used Stats for years and loved it -- for CPU, GPU, memory, and network upload/download speeds.

It's fantastic for catching when a bunch of processes haven't been killed and are stuck at 100%. For figuring out if my code is actually running on the GPU or not. For seeing what my network transfer rates are, when a download or transfer gets stuck, and which process is suddenly downloading hundreds of megabytes without telling me?

It gives me the security I have a top-level overview of what my computer's up to. Can't imagine my menubar without it.

Yeah, I've always been a fan of having something like this going. I have found bugs in my software just from having the continuous graph somewhere. "Why am I using 100% of the CPU for no reason right now? Oh, after 10 minutes without a request it enters an infinite loop here..."

Back in the old days the fans going to 100% was a good bug finder. But computers can be so quiet now, you have to use your eyes ;)

In my Intel MBP there’s an auditory warning when something is stuck at 100% utilization =D

> It's fantastic for catching when a bunch of processes haven't been killed and are stuck at 100%.

Exactly! I've been using iStat Menus for years and I find it invaluable. I've been able to identify system-wide problems a few times already just by glancing at the graphs and going "huh, that should not be happening right now". And it's not just stuck processes, but also misbehaving processes.

I did blog about this situation over a year ago here: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/hard-disk-leds-and-noisy-... :)

This looks like a clone of iStat Menus which I had installed for years and years till one day I realized I basically never look at it and the icons were just taking up space in my menu bar. I finally un-installed it.

The activity monitor in my dock set to show CPU is sufficient for my needs.

the one I use most often is about://peformance in Firefox

I used to open up Activity Monitor, but every single time my laptop fans kick on, it was the browser. with the browser performance monitor, i can see exactly which tab is being naughty. So now, I skip Activity Monitor and go straight to the source. Usually, a cmd-R on the offending tab brings it back under control. I assume some JS dev has not tested their code by having it running in a tab for an amount of time other than how long it takes to test their changes.

do you mean `about:processes`?

`about://performance` doesn't work at least from my FF, but `about:performance` redirects to `about:processes`

yes. about:performance

the // was just muscle memory/brain fart/oops

i never really noticed it redirected to processes.

It's also often just ads, and installing a blocker helps

blockers are fully engaged. it's not definitely not ads.

I think in the latest nightly, this is about:processes

omg thank you so much for this! Totally did not know this could be done from within FF!

Inhad no idea this existed.!

It is indeed a clone of iStat Menus. But a very good one, which I discovered when I got tired of paying for the yearly upgrade to iStat.

I'm using an old version of iStat Menus, works fine. I did try Stat but the text in the menu bar is too thin for my eyes, and the developer wasn't receptive to my PR that addressed the issue. Which is fine. But makes the app not for me.

I was finally persuaded to subscribe to Setapp. I had already paid for licenses to most of the software on Setapp, but as I have more and more of them roll into a “free” upgrade, I definitely think it’s worthwhile.

TIL you can show useful stats with 'Activity Monitor.app' right in the dock by right clicking the icon and selecting from the 'Dock Icon' menu item. Thanks!

Thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, the option I'd want - memory utilization - doesn't seem to be one of the choices.

+1, thank you js2!

I found iStatsMenu also destabilized my system. I’d get random kernel panics, while it was running.

It may have been just one of the display modules, as I didn’t use the default set, but I never felt like tracking it down, so I uninstalled it.

Every now and then, I try reinstalling it, but it still crashes the system. Not a big deal. Just eye candy.

I’m very curious what it is doing to panic your computer

I was, too, but I knew it would be a huge pain to track down (the crashes are very random). This is the kind of thing that MacsBug was good for.

For me, it doesn’t really have a ton of actual utility. It’s more of a “toy,” so I don’t really lose sleep over it.

I’m sure it works fine, for the vast majority of folks, so it’s obviously not something the authors worry about.

TIL you can set live dock icons. This is all I need too. Thank you.

iStat menus hit a lot harder when 8GB of RAM was a $2000 upgrade.

I remember when 4MB of RAM was several hundred dollars.

My first computer (a VIC-20) had 3KB of RAM. There was so little memory, that I had to write most of my software in 6502 Machine Language.

That’s great. You could map 3KB on, like, a sheet of paper.

I learned Photoshop 2.5 on a 5MB RAM/40MB HDD Mac IIvx (512KB video RAM, hell yeah). Seems incredible now, but that capability after upgrading from a pre-Windows 286 felt incredible then.

Now my Apple Silicon machine bogs down when everything’s trying to use the same core for UI I guess, and each browser tab consumes more resources than Mac OS 7.

> 5MB RAM/40MB HDD Mac IIvx

That was a top-of-the-line Mac, back then. On a par with a maxed-out Studio.

Not sure the IIvx was ever the top of the line, more like the butt of jokes. The 68040s were out in Quadras already, and this was a hobbled IIci. I remember we got it when they were slashing prices near the EOL, which is what made it a decent buy.

You’re right. I got it mixed up with the original Mac IIx (the gray box).

The first computer I programmed on was a Data General mainframe with 8k of RAM. But shortly before my first class they got CRT terminals so I didn't have to use punch cards, and it did support BASIC.

This also looks like a clone of the Old system stats for the GNOME 2 panel.

It made more sense when I used a dirt cheap computer and squeezed every Hz of it.

I did the same. I used to have iStat Menus running all the time, until i took a good look at how many resources it actually consumed showing me things i never looked at.

These days i keep Little Snitch's network monitor around, which i actually do look at sometimes, though mostly to get a glance at where my traffic is going.

> The activity monitor in my dock set to show CPU is sufficient for my needs.

Another #TIL for Apple hidden features

Cool. I used to pay for iStat Menus, but one day I got a new laptop and couldn't figure out how to download the old version I had bought a license for.

IMO it's essential to see cpu / mem / network consumption at all times and, on top of that, the top 5 apps consuming each one of them. It should be a default feature of computing devices by now, but it's so far from that which only benefits bad actors (resource hogs, bad software). I shouldn't have to launch activity monitor every time I want such basic info.

I'll try this out.

> IMO it's essential to see cpu / mem / network consumption at all times

Why?

At minimum, to just develop a sense of how the computer loads and de-loads as various services or programs are called

Not using any menubar stat programs currently, but have done so for exactly this reason in the past. Even if nothing is misbehaving, they’re helpful for keeping a pulse on your machine and for getting a feel for which programs are heavy on resources for no good reason.

It used to be that noise from hard drive activity and fans spinning up were a pretty good proxy for this, like how my iMac G5 would do its best impression of a jet engine whenever a flash ad banner appeared on screen. These days on M-series Macs though a random browser tab can be keeping a whole core pegged in the background and the only reason I’d notice is if I happened to touch the bottom of the laptop and notice it’s slightly warm.

I like to know that the programs I’m developing utilize resources as I expect or intent them to.

I might be bad at my job but it’s not uncommon for me to design something and discover it’s sucking back resources to some crazy degree. I don’t want to discover that in flame charts way after the fact. I’d rather see it in real time and diagnose the issue early on in the process.

Tells me when something is done

Basic insight into what your device is doing, and which app is doing what.

Lets you build intuition about what is normal vs abnormal. And it's also essential for letting you perceive which apps are bad citizens (and good citizens). Try one of these tools out for a month and you catch all sorts of random things.

Funnily enough, the computer's fan used to perform part of this role. But that has increasingly gone away as laptops become increasingly silent.

Once I randomly opened Activity Monitor on my M1 Macbook only to find that vim was using 100% of a CPU core, and the timer said it had been in this state for days! It wasn't even in the foreground of any terminal tab. Just in a spinloop in the background doing who knows what. And it might have stayed like this for a year until I'm forced to reset the computer for an update.

Another example that you might find more compelling is when your computer's network jumps to 5MB/s. It should always be explainable.

Reminds of MenuMeters - really great at showing real-time metrics and various types of graphs with different refresh intervals.

https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/

Aww yeah, I’ve been rocking menu meters for almost a decade now. I can’t believe people get by without a bandwidth meter at least, so helpful for so many reasons

Should be built-in to the OS, bandwidth meter is way more important than battery % specially with modern MacBooks lasting over 10 hours.

Oh yeah using that since I had my Powerbook. Must be 20 years. So happy that the fork exists and keeps it running.

Heh, I installed this and immediately found out that "LegacyScreenSaver" has leaked 40 GB of memory.

are you on a work laptop? A lot of times they have screensavers for intel arch, and apple silicon might have something to do with this problem

No, it's my personal laptop and the screensaver is definitely native (ARM). It's probably just Apple being sloppy again.

40 GB is not simple sloppiness when it comes to a simple screensaver. I would encourage you to explore other solutions than to just blame it on some historical precedent you've experienced. However true it may be. It's just not likely given the criteria.

Apparently it is slopiness in the form of an undocumented API contract breakage.

https://github.com/lpar/RedPill/issues/8 (the screensaver I use)

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/10/xscreensaver-6-08-out-now/ (linked from there)

Maybe I should submit a PR with this workaround.

Yes I can confirm it's exactly that.

Basically Apple made a new "safe" API for screensavers (via .appex) but is only using it internally. 3rd party screensavers must still use the old unsafe API (that uses plugins, so unsafe code).

To bridge that gap, Apple made legacyScreenSaver, an .appex that loads the plugin code. It's a great concept in practice, but the implementation has been a mess since macOS 10.15 (Catalina...), breaking many things (multi monitor support was a big one, broken in many different ways over the years). Some Apple built in screensavers haven't been ported to the new API, so you may still have issues with legacyScreenSaver without that.

With macOS 14, Apple broke it again and indeed, legacyScreenSaver no longer tells the third party screensaver to quit! My rough guess is that this is linked to the way they implemented the transition with the new built in aerial videos they added that "slows" down on your desktop (on practice, it's not the screensaver that becomes the desktop, but 2 separate process/video players that gets synced up!).

Anyway, it's been a mess for third party developers for a while (I make one called Aerial). Our best workaround is to listen for a macOS event that tells us the screensaver will exit, and time our way to forcing an exit (literally, we call exit() which we shouldn't do, but that's the only workaround that works-ish). It works maybe 99% of the time. But sometimes legacyScreenSaver still craps out on its own.

Killing it manually will fix things (you will get a black screen + some CPU usage until you do, that can get bad depending on the screensaver) too.

I (and others) reported that bug multiple times but it's been 1 year+ and nothing. It's a mess.

Why use power and memory to run a screensaver when you can put the display to sleep?

Screensavers do seem like a relic from the CRT era, but there is probably a fraction of a second difference between waking a display and simply dismissing a screensaver, which I imagine matters to some people.

Ah in that case I apologize. Truly baffling situation.

I've been for many years a happily paying customer of iStat Menus [1], from which this seem to be the heavily inspired of.

[1] https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

Been using stats for 4 years now, never had any issue with it. why pay when something free and open source is available.

I paid for it, and paid for one upgrade, but stats looks like it covers all of what I am interested in.

I've lost count of how many years I've owned a Bjango license. Amazing software.

One, two, three…Christ, 16 years here. This made me feel terrible. Thanks!

I think I paid for it a few times because it had been so long. I also got work to buy 12 licenses to monitor edit bays when they were overheating all the time. I could read the machines stats on an iPad!

Good times.

++ to this rec.

I've tried Stats over the years as the project has evolved and I keep coming back to iStat Menus. Stats feels very inspired by iStats Menus's design as well. The one thing I appreciate about Stats though is support more SMC sensor values.

Latest redesign is pretty garbage though. I want my precise graphs back!

I brew installed but it didn't come up in my menubar. Just restarted my Mac and now I see it. I'm too lazy to make a PR to update the docs though right now.

Edit: I just see the battery widget not any of the other ones. This is a confusing onboarding experience.

Edit2: ah, they were all hidden because of Macs crap UX on menubar space. No indication there are more menu item. What a poor design decision Mac.

Yeah, it's really bad UX how icons simply don't show up if there's no room on macOS. There should at least be a spillover.

Back in the day I paid for https://www.macbartender.com/ to get these features.

Thanks, I'm totally gonna try that!

You can also use Ice[1], which does the same thing and is open source

[1] https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

Looks like the features are very similar. Is there anything the commercial product does that the open source doesn't?

I've used both, and I think Bartender was a little more polished, UI wise.

This was after I stopped using Bartender, but it got silently sold to a third party https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/04/bartender-mac-app-new-o...

Ice is great. Took some fiddling but I have been stoked on it.

I would be very careful with using Bartender now. It was a great app, but recently bought by a shady company known for buying apps to milk them for money and user data. I recommend Ice, as linked by Khaine, which is open source, free, and works like a charme.

Alright, bet. Wanna make your Mac menu bar less clunky? Here’s the tea. Pop these commands in your terminal to tighten it up:

    defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8
    defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8

Changed your mind? No cap, just undo it with these:

    defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
    defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding

Then, log out and back in. Boom, you’re golden.

Ick

stickin out ya notch for the rizzler

What’s the slang about? The OP doesn’t seem to be using any slang or colloquialisms. I thought it was funny but I don’t think I fully got the joke.

It’s pretty close to this meme from like a year ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1963h4k/cs...

It's like ZoomerGPT or something. I actually needed a smile so i appreciated it.

wasn’t deep or nun, lowkey just wanted to help, learned this terminal thingy here fs

I have a system prompt for haiku to convert messages to genz slang. I use it to confuse friends with it sometimes and we have a laugh. I had the instructions somewhere stored and just wanted to rewrite them before posting them here because I am paranoid and did not remember if i posted them verbatim in another place with another username.

I know this is not really the place for this sort of thing, but if some people smiled a bit I am good with that

Totally off topic, but it's funny how much of "modern" slang (whatever the generation) is present in hip hop culture years before. I noticed that when "twerk" became a thing; I remembered songs about twerking from years before that.

In this case, the term "bet": I remembered hearing that for the first time in the late 1980s in a song by Fresh Prince (Will Smith): "... bet, well let's go then..." (As We Go, 1988)

That is because most American slang derives originally from black and LGBT culture, specifically African American Vernacular English.

This makes me cringe. No one talks like that

No-one you know, old person.

Using genZ/A words for sake of using them makes you unhinge and not genuine. And not being your authentic self is the least genz thing you can do

Also I am genz and calling someone old is rude

No one uses footnotes in a webforum other than here either, but here we are.

Thank you for sharing this. Presumably the item spacing with too large (by default) and as such, many of the icons would not display. This fixed it! Appreciate the suggestion

weird, they all appeared for me

Open source and especially free open source apps probably don't care too much about the "onboarding experience".

I've been using iPulse (https://ipulseapp.com/) for about twenty years now. It gets consistent compliments and questions from shoulder-surfers because it looks great, and it doesn't take much screen real estate. No affiliation, strong recommendation.

I found Stats would use quite a bit more CPU usage compared to iStats menus when I last tried it 3-4 months ago.

Neat little app, but it made bluetoothd go bananas on my CPU, chewing up to 40% (M2 MBA here)

That is explained in the FAQ, apparently the bt module is inefficient but you can disable it.

I disabled the module but it still chews up a lot of CPU.

Are there any equivalents that work in Windows 11? There were a handful that worked in previous versions of Windows but lots of them won't work in W11 and those that say they do are risky installs.

Love Stats. My only problem with it was remembering its name when I was setting up a new laptop.

On my previous laptop, I set it up once and then forgot about it. No need to update, no fuss, it just worked.

I’m being lazy (am an iStats user), has anyone here compared the two?

I swapped from stats to iStats a few years ago. I've found stats to be easier to customize and the UI is more uniform. That said, it doesn't have the weather widget, so I've kept iStats around solely for its weather functionality.

I assume you mean you went iStats -> stats

A weather widget is built-in to macOS now.

System Settings > Control Center > Weather

argh!! why oh why does mine not have this??? Sequoia 15.1.1

It comes with Sequoia 15.2.

I am still on 15.1.1 too as I have been waiting for a 15.2.1 for bug fixes, but they released 15.3 instead.

of course it is.

thanks. now i'm wondering why it hasn't been pestering me to upgrade. i just went and looked, and now it sees the upgrade possible. i must have told it later and promptly forgot about it

I switched from iStats to stats like 1 year ago. I found it more responsive (and free). I'm using Vetero for the weather functionality.

Stats + Hidden Bar + Brave are my first 3 downloads on any new Mac

I did not know about Hidden Bar, will try that out! I've been using Bartender for a long time but that is not free.

I haven't heard about Hidden Bar before, but https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice is quite nice.

Unfortunate that you mentioned Brave invalidating your previous two suggestions!

Different reaction over here. I've never heard of Stats or Hidden Bar, but as a Brave fan I'm going to go check them out.

Unfortunately worse and not as compact/configurable as the paid iStat menu option, and that's something the dev doesn't want to change...

Well it’s free so…

This seems to be another form of MenuMeters, which I think I've been using since my first experiments with Mac OS X 10.0 on a PowerMac 7600 or thereabouts.

https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/

I had a neat program like this for Windows in the early 2000s. Got it from a Microsoft engineer who unfortunately I lost contact with. It must have been the lightest-weight resource monitor program to have ever existed for Windows NT, 2000, CE, and XP. Basically it took the Task Manager's resource meters, displayed them transparently, and set them on the upper-right corner of the screen.

reminds me of power tools

Oooh this is nice actually, I am curious though, are there any plans to integrate this into the Touch Bar ? I would offer to do it myself or at least have a crack at it but I haven't ever developed for the TouchBar and my motivation to start isn't too high..

I miss being able to hear the click of the hard drive to know when my system was doing a lot of disk IO, which often was caused by swapping when RAM had been exceeded. I wonder if there's something that turns high utilization into an audible signal these days.

Windows doesn't have a programmable equivalent does it? Last time I messed around with this stuff I got by with an Electron app and using browser desktop notifications but I think I couldn't actually modify the taskbar/put icons somewhere.

using an Electron app for this just feels like a 30lb sledge to drive in a finishing nail.

Electron is overkill, but it can be quite lightweight with something like Tauri as it doesn't bundle another browser and uses the default web renderer.

I don't know about programmable, but hwInfo used to be pretty popular on Windows for monitoring temps/hd/CPU/etc.

https://www.hwinfo.com

yeah I just meant in general not specific to hw info

Unclear what you mean by programmable, but https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro... is the bee's knees and you can set an option to have it take over taskmon.exe, launch on login, and put as many of the widgets in the taskbar as you fancy. I love it

I've heard about running them directly from SMB but have never been the kind of person to try out such a stunt https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/#sysinternals...

yeah if you can modify the taskbar that's interesting, like where the weather/news comes in that area

I use XMeters. It's okay. You have a little customization to which meters to display, but it does pretty much everything I'd like it to. Per-core bar graph, memory utilization, and disk and network up/down rates.

The config ui is unbelievably slow with a very early windows 7 aesthetic. But I've seen that screen maybe three times in as many years. It's fine, I guess.

The main.taskbar widget seems perfectly cromulent though. No noticeable impact on system resources, and the updating feels plenty snappy. I'm happy with paying a few bucks for this widget.

Stats is great! The only issue I've had with it is each time it updates itself as it's unsigned the binary is flagged and can't be opened until you run xattr -rc /Applications/Stats.app on it.

Huh? That doesn't happen to me. Mine is signed.

Its been a long time since I've seen the word MacOS.

Seems like with AI + the faux Apple claims of running (any meaningful) AI, people are just not using it.

Like there has been a near total drop-off of mention since ~May 2024.

I like that I was able to style these with a super minimal theme in my menu bar that gives me a glance at what my system is up to and if it's outside normal parameters.

Have been using this for about a year now without issue.

For me Stats replaced MenuMeters, which has not been updated lately.

Menumeters still works for me on the latest MacOS (actually it's some fork of menumeters)

What does this have that menumeters hasn't?

I've just switched, mainly it works 100% while some menumeter sensors do not show up on the menu bar for me. The drop down menu is also much more informative and modern with charts.

Same as hombre_fatal - I used to use iStats Menus, but no need any longer. This is great. I'm watching multiple SSDs activity, network activity, cpu, memory, etc.

I've used XRG (free) from gaucho.software through many changes of hardware CPU numbers and macOS versions. Light and fluffy, for me at least.

Used this to identify that my 2019 16" MBP with 5300M GPU was drawing 20W at idle from the gpu when connected to a 1440p60 monitor.

> There is no way to obtain a CPU frequency on Apple silicon macs.

Ha! You can rip my Intel Mac from my cold, dead hands.

I have happily used the free Stats app for a couple of years now.

Hey iStat users, what makes the paid tool worth it for you?

Looks better, support weather, supports more sensors, more configuration options… But Stats is sufficient, I just use iStats for ages and it ask for little money ~two times in a decade.

with macs being so powerful, I am now only monitoring 12 hour energy consumption in Activity Monitor

I needed something like stats back when RAM was an issue on my MacBook 2011 (I installed 16Gb even so 8 was the official max from Apple) and the n during the 2020ish years before my first M series to figure out why my fans started to act up. Now I also only need to figure out what eats Batterie.

I need it on apple silicon for the opposite reason, because there is basically no feedback from the computer if something is eating all then resources. Eg sometimes something eats my ram and it starts swapping and I do not even notice.

Exactly my situation too. Both for CPU (the MBA is fanless) and memory. You just have no idea otherwise, in many cases.

it phones home, make sure to disable its internet connection using Lulu or something.

Checking for updates is not the same as "phoning home".

It also comes with telemetry, but you can disable it.

Actually, it is. Just because you deem that innocent enough "because everyone is doing it", it still leaks a lot of information to various parties.

it connects to the maintainer's personal website IP.

Looks nice. Any suggestions for a similar graphical tool for Linux?

If you're using Gnome, you could try the system-monitor-next extension[1]. The main thing to note when installing for the first time is that you'll also need to install a few system packages[2].

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3010/system-monitor-n...

[2] https://github.com/mgalgs/gnome-shell-system-monitor-next-ap...

There is (also a Gnome-only) lightweight alternative called Vitals:

https://github.com/corecoding/Vitals/issues

    Vitals is a GNOME Shell extension for displaying your computer's temperature, voltage, fan speed, memory usage, processor load, system resources, network speed and storage stats in your GNOME Shell's top menu bar. This is a one stop shop to monitor all of your vital sensors. Vitals uses asynchronous polling to provide a smooth user experience.

what's the advantage of this over something like btop?

This is glanceable from (and permanently resident in) the status bar and isn’t a TUI app. Although one may not see those as advantages…

Could you please it put it in the store? Or add to brew?

Did you look at the readme? It’s right there at the top dude.

Why does it ask for Bluetooth permissions on launch?

Can it beat istat?

Interesting to see MacOS users finally get an option like this. KDE Plasma has this for the past 5+ years, you can even create little custom reporting widgets with various system information and different chart designs.

This didn't just come out, this has been available on MacOS for years.

I love the way KDE handles system monitor widgets, especially nowadays. It's great for people that want to make graphs with desperate sensors like plotting your CPU temp against your GPU temp or your IO speed with your network speed.

The lack of a systray on MacOS is one of the reasons I really hate the interface. Stuff like this can partly make up for that.

How is a menu bar app not a substitute for the systray?

Because programs can not register an icon to minimize the apps to the menubar app while providing core functionality and info via a context menu and tooltips, at least AFAIK.

Spotify can do that, so apparently it's an option even though not very common.

Any app can, provided they build a menu item. Most apps don't, and those that do don't usually connect the presentation of the menu to an action in the app, it just runs alongside the app (e.g. Kaleidoscope). But you could do that if you wanted.

Interesting to know, thank you.

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