iPulse has been sitting in the lower left hand corner of two of my computers since Xmas. To date, it’s identified two issues with OS X that I probably would not have noticed if I wasn’t running it.

Problem #1 was a runaway SystemUIServer process. I noticed it this morning when iPulse began reporting unusually high percentage of the CPU being devoted to the user… hovering somewhere between 40 and 70 percent. Now, I hadn’t actually noticed a performance degradation in the system, so props to iPulse for hanging out in the corner of my screen and being colorful.

Turns out Problem #1 may be related to menu extras… specifically WeatherPop. This article talks about the issue in depth. I can say that shutting down WeatherPop didn’t solve the runaway process, but restarting did… so far.

Problem #2 was on my work machine, a G4 Mac OS X Server. After staring at iPulse on an 800Mhz TiBook, I was shocked when I fired it up on the server and saw how much network activity was going on. Now, it’s a server so Problem #2 may not actually be a problem, but I have very little actually turned on, so it’ll be interesting to figure out who is hogging the network cycles. (FYI: A quick glance at netstat shows slp being rather chatty)

Until now, iPulse has felt like a guilty pleasure. HEY LOOK AT ME I’M A MAC USER WITH A COOL LICKABLE UTILTIIES. HA HA ha. I’m happy to see the insight the tool gives me is helping me continue to understand what the hell is going on under the hood in OS X.