Open Activity Monitor on any Mac that's been alive for a week and sort by memory. You get a wall of Google Chrome Helper (Renderer), Code Helper (Renderer), Safari Web Content, node. A hundred rows, most of them helpers, none of them answering the only question you actually asked: which app is eating my Mac?
The answer is always an app. Chrome launched those helpers. VS Code launched its helpers. But Activity Monitor shows you the process tree flattened, so you do the grouping in your head, process by process, every time.
I kept doing that grouping by hand, so I built an app that does it: HeartbeatMac. Every helper gets folded into the app that launched it. A thousand processes become a hundred apps, one figure each for CPU, memory, energy, disk, network and GPU. If you want the forensics, expand the app and the real process list is right there. Quit or force quit from either level, and it asks before killing anything.
A few things I put in because Activity Monitor annoyed me without them:
- Live charts per app, not just a snapshot number
- 30 days of history, so "has my Mac gotten slower since Tuesday" has an answer
- Alerts when something misbehaves, instead of you babysitting a sorted list
- A menu bar monitor for the one number you actually check
To be fair to the incumbents: iStat Menus is excellent and deeper than this in most ways, and Stats is free and open source. If you live in those, you may not need this. HeartbeatMac is for the person who opened Activity Monitor this week, got 900 rows of helpers, and closed it.
It's a native app, macOS 15 Sequoia or later. Launch price is $5 once (going to $29 after the first 200 licences, which are going), lifetime updates, 7-day free trial, licence covers 3 Macs.
The site has a live preview with simulated data you can click around, since a web page can't read your Mac and shouldn't:
https://www.heartbeatmac.com/?utm_source=devto&utm_campaign=heartbeat-launch
Happy to answer anything about how the grouping works or what it costs to sample all of this without slowing the Mac down.
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