OS Track for Mac

This is one that bears keeping an eye on. I've used this for several days each time there's been an update. The first couple of versions were a real problem, using so much CPU that they slowed my computer down and eventually stalled it. The latest version is pretty good, in the sense that it does what it says it should and gives a useful record of which apps have been using most RAM, CPU, and so on. It's helped me to skinny up my running gear so that my CPU usage runs at a much lower average, and my computer seems more responsive on the whole. (I use the word "seems" deliberately, because I haven't benchmarked anything so it's a subjective feeling that things are a bit zippier.) Having said that, one of the bits of running gear I've ditched is OS Track itself. It still uses a little too much CPU for comfort. But each time it's been updated so far it's improved, so I'm looking forward to the next version to see how that goes. I suspect that eventually this may get to the point where I can leave it running constantly. Keep going, developer! You're getting closer every time!

I installed this software and within two or three hours my system hung, which has never occurred before. And I mean HUNG! Everything froze, and after some fiddling around, i.e. try to run Force Quit, the cursor disappeared. This problem sprung up after I heard some very repetitive, but soft, disk sound which kept up, i.e. never stopped. As soon as I started investigating this by bringing up Activity Monitor and Force Quit, the system froze. FTR, I was able to see in AM that half of my 8 GB of RAM was in use just before this freeze, so I wasn't overtaxing the system. Tried pushing the power/eject button (this is on a Mac Book Pro running OS X 10.6.8), and a fairly standard-looking query window me up asking me if I wanted to restart, shutdown, etc., but before I could even choose an option, the screen went dark/black and the spinning beach ball of death appeared (so I guess the "cursor" came back, sort of). I then attempted to do a hard shutdown again with the power/eject button (holding it down for 4 seconds and then a second time for 10 seconds) and after reading up on the matter, I also tried CMD+CNTRL+EJECT/POWER, which also did nothing. Even shutting the laptop would not put it into sleep mode. After about 45 minutes while looking for help online on another computer and unplugging and replugging, I tried the power/eject button again and mercifully the machine shut down. I then restarted it and things appeared ok. The first thing I did was attempt to uninstall OS Track; however, since I had it set up for starting on login, I wasn't able to quit it. All I could do was toggle off this feature and then reboot my machine once again. After which I yanked this app off my system ASAP. I've had my MPB for 15 months and it has been very stable. Never had anything like this happen, so I strongly suspect it was this code. I acknowledge that I had three browsers (Safari, Camino and FireFox) with multiple tabs going at the time, but as I said I was still using less than half of my RAM. Most of my ratings are self-explanatory; however, I also give it a low Ease of Use rating because of the way one must get out of it if it is set up to start at login, i.e. you must toggle this option and then reboot. Caveat Emptor. This experience also makes me that much more leary of downloading from the MAS.

While fiddling around with this I noticed that one of the largest bars was for OS Track itself. Checked it on Activity Monitor and found it burns about 320 megs of RAM. Will hang on to this but it's a bit heavy to run in background.