MenuMeters

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At a Glance

Expert’s Rating

I started with MenuMeters and liked it well enough. Clean, simple, and I'm only interested in memory and cpu so it fit my needs well. I then tried iState Menus, just the trial, and was a bit overwhelmed at all of the info it can give you. I played with it some and ended up switching back simply because I like the appearance of MenuMeters better. Yujitach/MenuMeters is an open source project licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 only which is an OSI approved license. MenuMeters Alternatives Similar projects and alternatives to MenuMeters. MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X. Although there are numerous other programs which do the same thing, none had quite the feature set I was looking for. Most were windows that sat in a corner or on the desktop, which are inevitably obscured by document windows on a laptop's small screen. MenuMeters is a Preferences Pane that allows you to visualize statistics about your CPU, disk, memory, and network usage. The pane places 4 different menus in your status bar, one for each monitored resource. MenuMeters is a free open source network monitoring tool which monitors CPU, disk, memory and network activity on your Mac. However, officially the developers claims that it is not officially compatible with OS X 10.11 El Capitan or above but in tests, it does seem to work on macOS 10.12 Sierra or above.

Cons

Our Verdict

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’sSummer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Curious what’s going on with your system’s CPU, disk drives, network activity, or memory usage? While there are many apps that can track these things for you, my personal favorite is Raging Menace’s MenuMeters.

Through highly-customizable constantly-updating menu bar icons, you can view indicators for any or all of those four categories of activity. For each indicator, you can specify how often it’s updated, what type of icon is used, the colors used, and certain settings unique to that indicator.

When you click on an indicator in the menu bar, a menu appears showing even more information. Click the CPU icon, for instance, and see not only the CPU usage, but also your system’s uptime, the average system load, and two menu items you can use to launch Console or Activity Monitor.

If you’re an information freak, MenuMeters presents tons of detail in a well-designed and minimally-intrusive interface.

MenuMeters
MenuMeters cannot be used on 10.11 El Capitan, please see 'System Requirements' below.

MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X. Although there are numerous other programs which do the same thing, none had quite the feature set I was looking for. Most were windows that sat in a corner or on the desktop, which are inevitably obscured by document windows on a laptop's small screen. Those monitors which used the menubar mostly used the NSStatusItem API, which has the annoying tendency to totally reorder my menubar on every login.

The MenuMeters monitors are true SystemUIServer plugins (also known as Menu Extras). This means they can be reordered using command-drag and remember their positions in the menubar across logins and restarts.

  • The CPU Meter can display system load both as a total percentage, or broken out as user and system time. It can also graph user and system load and display the load as a 'thermometer'. The menu for the CPU Meter contains several pieces of information I like to have a single click away.

  • The Disk Activity Meter displays disk activity to local disks on the system (anything that is a IOKit BlockStorage driver). It is hotplug aware, and will show activity on FireWire and USB disks as they are mounted. The Disk Meter menu shows volume space details for local drives (it does not display mounted network volumes for performance reasons).

  • The Memory Meter can display current memory usage as either a pie chart, thermometer, history graph, or as used/free totals. The Memory Meter menu shows a breakdown of current memory usage and VM statistics. The Memory Meter can optionally display a paging indicator light.

  • The Net Meter can display network throughput as arrows, bytes per second, and/or as a graph. Both the arrows and the graph are scaled using a user-selected scaling factor and calculation. Scaling can be done on the basis of actual link speed reported by the network interface or peak traffic and can use one of several scaling calculations. The Net Meter menu shows current interfaces and their status. Interface information is gathered from the SystemConfiguraton framework and thus is Mac OS X network location aware (to prevent interfaces from appearing in this menu see the FAQ).

MenuMeters comes without warranty or support. That said, if it causes you problems I'd like to hear about it so that I may be able to track down the bug. Even better, since this is open source, you can fix the bug yourself. Patches are accepted.

Screenshots

MenuMeters is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This makes it both 'free' as in beer and 'free' as in speech, for those who partition the world using that terminology (I am not one of them). MenuMeters is open source mostly because there isn't a good reason for it not to be, except, perhaps, saving myself the embarrassment of having others look at my first C code from a long time ago.

See the 'GNU General Public License.rtf' file for full license terms.

System Requirements

Due to new Apple-enforced code signature restrictions, MenuMeters is not compatible with the OS X 10.11 'El Capitan' public beta. Although the restriction is similar, this is not directly related to 10.11's 'System Integrity Protection' (SIP, aka 'rootless') feature and disabling SIP has no effect on MenuMeters.

Unless Apple makes the signature restriction optional, it is not clear that MenuMeters in its present form can ever be made compatible with OS X 10.11.

In the meantime I can only suggest that you do not install 10.11 if you wish to use MenuMeters.

Menumeters
  • Mac OS X 10.4 or later (10.10 supported, 10.11 incompatible)
  • PowerPC or Intel based Macintosh (Universal Binary)

NOTE: IF YOU ARE INSTALLING OVER AN OLDER VERSION OF MENUMETERS YOU MUST LOGOUT AND LOGIN AFTER INSTALLATION IN ORDER TO LOAD THE NEW VERSION.


MenuMeters 1.8.1 compressed disk image (dmg)
MenuMeters 1.8.1 source code (tar.gz)