See what your Mac is busy with
Activity Checks shows CPU, memory and GPU, counts helper processes with the app that owns them, and puts the readings on your desktop as widgets.
Watch it work
Animated demo with example figures
Activity Checks shows CPU, memory and GPU, counts helper processes with the app that owns them, and puts the readings on your desktop as widgets.
Chrome runs as 27 processes on this Mac. Activity Checks adds them up and shows one row for the app, so you can see what is really using your memory.
CPU, Memory and GPU come in the small size, and Overview puts all three side by side. Each widget graphs the last hour, and clicking one opens the app on that reading.
Right-click the desktop, choose Edit Widgets, then search for Activity Checks.
macOS keeps RAM full on purpose, so Activity Checks colours memory by pressure instead of how full it is, and breaks it down into app memory, wired, compressed and cached files.
One bar for each of an M2's four performance and four efficiency cores, with two minutes of history behind every chart in the app.
Activity Checks reads your Mac once a second while its window is open. Measured on a Mac with an M2, that costs about 3% of one CPU core.
Closed, Activity Checks uses nothing. The widgets only run for a moment when macOS refreshes them.
Runs on macOS 15 Sequoia or later, on Apple silicon and Intel. The whole app is a 2.5 MB download.
Right-click the desktop, choose Edit Widgets and drag in CPU, Memory, GPU or Overview.
Widgets refresh on the schedule macOS sets, every few minutes, and every minute while the app is open. Each one graphs the last hour.
Activity Checks reads every app you run without administrator rights. System processes owned by root stay private.
The app contains no networking code, so nothing about your Mac leaves it. There is no account to create.
It runs outside the App Store sandbox so it can read other apps' CPU and memory. The widgets themselves stay in the sandbox.
Version 0.1 for macOS 15 or later, on Apple silicon and Intel. Open it once, then add the widgets from Edit Widgets.
Download for macOS