The native Mac monitor built for the way you actually work in 2026 — Claude Code chewing 8 GB, eleven MCP servers each forking subprocesses, Chrome's twenty-three helpers, and not a single one labelled in Activity Monitor.
↑ a real second of your week, probably
Three things eat your Mac in 2026, and the system tools that ship with macOS can't tell you about any of them.
A long Claude Code session can sit on 8 GB+ of resident memory across its renderer and helpers. Activity Monitor groups them as "Code Helper" and shrugs.
Every MCP server runs as one (or three, or eight) node subprocesses. Each shows up only as node — no hint of which integration, no idea what's leaking.
Chrome doesn't have processes, it has a swarm. Killing them one-by-one triggers a "tab crashed" pop-up for every renderer. SystemPulse asks the parent app to quit, silently.
CPU, RAM, disk, thermal — sampled every two seconds with sub-1% overhead. Sub-pixel-tuned typography, not progress bars.
The moat. We sniff @modelcontextprotocol/server-* processes, group by integration, surface per-server RAM and call-rate. Nothing else does this.
Detects shared .app parents, asks them to quit via osascript. Chrome's 23 renderers close cooperatively — no "tab crashed" pop-ups, no extension restore prompts.
Caches, build artefacts, npm scratch, browser disk. Every action is logged to ~/Library/Logs/SystemPulse/actions.log. Reversible in spirit; visible in fact.
Borderless always-on-top panel. Sits over your IDE, full-screen Spaces too. Drag anywhere. Forget it's there until red goes amber.
A single digit in your menu bar — CPU%, RAM%, both, or thermal letter. Configurable, monospace, never jitters width.
The Overview tab is the home screen — four tiles, three rolling sparklines, the top five RAM-hungry process groups labelled by what they actually are. You glance once.
Auto-grouped by app. Tap once to quit the parent — every helper, every renderer, every extension's background worker. No per-tab "tab crashed" pop-ups, no permission prompts, just back to the prompt.
Caches your dev workflow actually creates — npm, pip, yarn, pnpm, docker, browser, Xcode DerivedData. Sized live, sorted by reclaimable. Every deletion appended to an audit log.
One named row per MCP server. Per-server RAM, process count, sub-tree breakdown. Built because we couldn't find ours either, and Activity Monitor said "node, node, node, node, node, node."
The everyday monitor. Open source. No account.
MIT LICENCE · github.com/711web/systempulse-lite
For the day Claude Code is eating your laptop.
LIMITED-TIME LAUNCH OFFER · 50% OFF FIRST YEAR
$15 / yr (was $30, 50% off launch) · 2 Macs · cancel any time · secure checkout via Stripe
Activity Monitor lists every helper as the parent app's name, doesn't expose MCP server identity, can't bulk-quit by app, and lacks any concept of "the AI workload". It's also kernel of macOS — same as it was a decade ago.
Lite will be — MIT licensed, sources on GitHub at 711web/systempulse-lite in the next release. Pro features (cleanup, kill, MCP inspector) ship in a closed-source binary because we need to recoup development cost. Either way, every action SystemPulse takes is logged to ~/Library/Logs/SystemPulse/actions.log so you can audit it.
Lite: no network calls at all. Pro: a single license-validation request on launch (once per day), and Sparkle update checks if you opt-in. No telemetry, no analytics, no process names leave your Mac.
Universal binary as of v1.0.8 — runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Pure SwiftUI + AppKit. Minimum macOS 13 Ventura.
7-day free trial of Pro before you pay. If something breaks within 30 days of purchase, email refund@711web.com and we'll refund the year, no questions.
Yes. We built it for the AI-builder workflow, but the monitor + cleanup tools work just as well if you're "just" a Mac dev with too many Chrome tabs and Docker containers. The MCP inspector is the only feature that's no-op without MCP servers running.