Toolbar: circle chart/icon

[tborychowski]

Not sure if it's a feature request or a bug report, but:

The problem

The circle chart in the toolbar:

• there's no info on it and what it shows
• it doesn't seem to be the total CPU load, as the numbers don't add-up.

Proposed solution

Maybe a tooltip with some more info or popover with some more stats would make it a bit more useful.

[robert-v]

The chart is meant to be an overall CPU consumption %. It should roughly match what you see in Activity Monitor graphs: Sytem + User %
I need to invest some more time into this as it was kind of neglected. I can imagine it would show more info, like load per core etc. If you have any suggestions, what it should show and how, please let me know :)

[tborychowski]

Thanks.
Yeah, I thought so (that it was supposed to show the CPU usage), but it doesn't seem to add up:

(unless these numbers mean a different thing, as some processes sometimes show even over 100%, which is always confusing to me, because I cannot understand how 2 processes can use 100% cpu in the same time 😉)

As for what to show: for starters - a tooltip would help a lot 🙂
And if you decide to add add a popover, the system's Activity Monitor has a nice overview at the bottom:

[robert-v]

CPU% per process is relative to a single core, so if a process uses 150%, it means it's utilizing the equivalent of 1.5 cores. If you have eight cores, the maximum value you could theoretically see for a single process is 800%. In contrast, overall CPU% is usually shown as a normalized value - essentially the sum divided by the number of cores. This is how tools like Activity Monitor, top, and htop report it as well.

Also, if you sum launchd recursively (running as root to get everything) and divide it by number of cores, that should roughly equal to the gauge value. But since there is rounding in place and numbers are retrieved at slightly different times during the snapshot, it wont be exactly 100% match.

Thanks for your inputs, I'll try to extend the gauge with some useful information.

[tborychowski]

Wow, thanks for the explanation. That makes perfect sense now! 🙂

[SoCuul]

For some reason the CPU% icon is taking up more space than previously. Would be great if it could be a tiny bit smaller, to not stick out as much amongst the other toolbar buttons.