I run on battery a lot and occasionally a process/app will crash in the background and start sucking up 100% of one or more cores. That in turn burns my battery down way faster than normal. I used to notice this because my iStat Menu graph would go solid, but now with 8 cores and often only one pegged it's not as obvious.
I'm wondering if there's a utility/watcher that would pop up a dialog warning if a process took up 100% of a core for more than 5-10 seconds? That way I could decide if it was OK to let run (ie. compile/render) or I should manually kill it (ie. app crashed).
I vaguely recall something like this years ago but haven't been able to find it.
Best Answer
I don't know if it will accept a time frame as a parameter, but atMonitor definitely will provide Growl notifications based upon specific criteria.