Alternative activity monitors for OS X?

Solution 1:

iStat Menus and its free Dashboard widget version iStat Pro can show you a good broad overview of your Mac's systems, but I'm afraid I don't know of any monitoring utilities that show individual application processes (ie Finder activity copying files) other than shell tools like lsof or top.

edit I had forgotten about good old fseventer - last updated in 2010 but still working on 10.6.8.

Solution 2:

Strictly for monitoring RAM use, FreeMemory works well. It sits in the menu bar.

Solution 3:

I've been using MenuMeters for many revisions of OSX, it is similar to iStat Menus. I use it to keep an eye at real time performance like network and CPU.

Solution 4:

atMonitor presents itself as “the most advanced monitoring tool for Mac OS X that displays system activity in real-time”, and is intended as an Activity Monitor replacement.

Solution 5:

I'd also like to recommend MenuMeters. I always install it first-thing on any Mac i need to do serious stuff on for longer than 15 min.

But another monitor i sometimes use when i need more info/details is XRG.

Nice and clean, feature-rich and completely customizable. And as a bonus it is alot less CPU-hogging than Activity Monitor, which can use over 25% of CPU, even on the fastest machines…