Please suggest a Mac program similar to "top" on Linux

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Aug 20, 2007, at 5:38 AM, Richard Bronosky wrote:

> Thanks for going through the effort to try it out!  I figured that a  
> proc monitor was doing some kernel leve stuff and wouldn't compile  
> on a foreign kernel, so I didn't even try.  By "port... foe the Mac"  
> I meant simply port, not MacPort.
>
> I live two totally isolated lives on my Mac.  In my professional  
> life I do everything from a shell.  Give me iTerm, ssh, scp, vim,  
> (Gnu) screen, and mysql, and I'm happy.  In my personal life I like  
> the ooey GUI benefits of the Mac, for photo and video management, etc.
>
> So, for anyone else out there, I'm still looking for a good "top" app.

I think it's reasonably fair to say that this simply does not exist,  
though writing one would probably occupy less than a month or two, so  
we're not talking about erecting the great pyramid here.

I also don't think it's really even worth exploring a port of Linux's  
htop unless you just want to steal the front end of it and rewrite  
everything else.  The statistics gathering methodology is just too  
different on the two platforms.  Linux uses procfs, as you've already  
determined, and Mac OS X uses a combination of sysctls, private API  
and .. other stuff .. for grabbing information out of Mach and the  
variety of other places we've squirreled it.

It's been on my TODO list for awhile to truly abstract all of this out  
(we made a few half-hearted attempts with libtop and libproc, but they  
never got advanced to the actual API stage and still have holes in  
their coverage) but I need a really motivated intern or something...    
That's not to say "you can't get there from here", it's just more  
difficult than it needs to be.  Good luck. :)

- Jordan