Keep your CPU under control with App Tamer
It's been a little while since we've heard from St. Clair Software, makers of the well-known system utility, Default Folder X (which we've covered before). You may recall that we caught up with St. Clair Software developer Jon Gotow at WWDC '09. Well, he's got something new to announce today: App Tamer, a system utility for keeping CPU-intensive applications under control.
App Tamer is similar to some other utilities, in that it allows you to "freeze" selected applications so that they use up zero CPU time, leaving more processing power for other applications. What makes App Tamer special is AutoStop, which pauses and unpauses frozen applications when you switch away from or back to them. It also has options for temporarily unfreezing applications at a configurable interval, allowing apps to complete background activities even while frozen. It's quite flexible, but takes very little user knowledge or time to get it up and running.
It's great for apps that run wild, like Safari with a Flash movie paused in the background, or TweetDeck running high and then crashing. As a matter of fact, when I was beta testing App Tamer this month, it kept TweetDeck running non-stop for a week, which I've never been able to do before.
App Tamer is smart, too. It can check to see if a frozen web browser is currently downloading and wait for the download to finish before freezing it. A menubar item shows you which apps are running, which apps are frozen, and how much CPU each is using. A main control window gives you an overview of your system processes, including background tasks, and allows you to select apps to control or enable/disable AutoStop entirely. There's even a "Gaming Mode," which lets you freeze all processes except the current, foreground application in order to dedicate full processing power to that app.
App Tamer is priced at $14.95US and a fully functional, time-limited trial is available for download. Take a look at the main page and the App Tamer FAQ for answers to a few common questions. If you wish your system would run a little faster without compromising how many or which apps you can have open at once, give it a try.
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It's been a little while since we've heard from St. Clair Software, makers of the well-known system utility, Default Folder X (which we've...
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I requested this feature over two years ago with authors of peek-a-boo (still a very cool app)
I love this app! It's particularly useful for macbooks. You can easily double or even triple your runtime. In the past I just manually paused processes with peek-a-boo. Now it's automatic!
It's St. Clair, TUAW, not St. Claire.
September 19 2010 at 3:43 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThanks, fixed.
September 19 2010 at 5:11 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyMissed one " . . . we caught up with St. Claire Software developer . . . "
September 19 2010 at 3:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplySo this turns a modern preemptive multitasking OS into a throwback from the 80's ? I think I'll pass. If you think you need this app you need to close some background apps or stop running crappy apps that use cpu from no reason at all (looking at you Firefox+Flash.)
Now what I do need is an application that would stop OSX moving my files in the background when my HD space gets low. I'll just be doing something and then all of a sudden my HD rattles for 5 minutes making everything slow as molasses. Or something to stop OSX from spinning up external HDs just to access a file in my damn homedir.
To expound upond things further get yourself a good UNIX / Mac OS/X manual that actually has some meat to it. Learn then to use the "man" command which is the built in UNIX manual from a terminal.
One of the first things to research would be the "nice" command as it is an easy way to reduce CPU usage for long running commands.
Then maybe look at "setpriority".
There is a lot of power umderneath the Mac GUI! Learning to use even a little of it can lead much more effective use of your hardware. It is important to realize that under Macs shirt there is a living and breathing UNIX machine.
This isn't to discount the utility of this app, it may be very useful. It is just that there are already features in place to give you control over your apps and the machones responsiveness. Depending on what you do for a living there are a tremendous amount of utilities built into Mac OS/X that you can make use of. Plus a whole basket ful of open source software that runs as good on a Mac as it does on a Linux machine.
Dave
"There is a lot of power underneath the Mac GUI! Learning to use even a little of it can lead much more effective use of your hardware."
I don't doubt your words, but one of the reasons for switching to Mac for me (10 years ago) was the fact that I didn't need to enter the machineroom. If those capabilities are there I want to be able to use them just as I can use Pages, Safari or iTunes.
It's the same as owning a car: when I want to drive I push the pedal. What happens elsewhere is something I don't understand and don't want to be bothered with.
If there's a possibility to switch of thing that are not needed, I simply want to check or uncheck and I'm afraid working with the terminal is just not for me.
It seemed cool at first, but then I decided to put it to the test. Note that I have a wicked fast SSD in my Macbook Pro. I wanted to see how it would handle the application-pausing if I launched all my apps at once.. but actually, from my 5 minutes of playing with this app, it looks like you have to manually check the box for each app (just the first time) to tell it to pause it when it's not active, so this experiment is probably flawed. All my apps launched fairly quickly, but some warning came up on App Tamer saying it had to relaunch the helper or something.. the computer was basically becoming overloaded I guess..? but I should enable the pausing for each app one by one, then try the experiment again to see how it actually handles it. be back later..
September 17 2010 at 8:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThis sounds basically like the iOS implementation of multi-tasking. Something Apple should buy and integrate with OS X. Trying it out now.
September 17 2010 at 8:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyUNIX has supported process management for years, this just puts a pretty face on it.
September 17 2010 at 9:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyOnly saves 1% and that took some doing - i do have the i7 iMac tho.
It's the HDD that's letting the system down, I wish there was a tool that would help identify which apps used the HDD. I know there's a command for it in terminal for seeing read/writes but I mean something more graphical - and a freeze option for it would be great too - until I upgrade to a SSD system.
looks awesome, will certainly give it a try!
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TUAW (or The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is a website devoted to tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple.
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