App: Runaway Process
Developer: Five Boroughs Apps
Genres: Utilities, Developer Tools

Get a warning when a runaway process is eating up your CPU cycles. Apple's computers are so amazing that they are now cool and quiet even when they are hard at work. This is fantastic... unless you have a runaway process. It used to be that you'd hear your fan spinning wildly and the computer would be hot enough to cook an egg on, but some of the latest Macs don't even have fans and stay cool no matter what stress they are under. Now if an app has a bug and starts to max out a CPU core there is no real warning. You may notice things going a tiny bit slower, or if you are using a laptop you might notice your battery draining a little faster than normal. However, often you won't notice anything until hours later when you realize your battery is almost empty or you think after a few days that you might not been getting the full performance of your computer.

Runaway solves this problem by continually checking in on your computer's processors and notifying you instantly when any of your CPU cores have been maxed out for longer than usual. The app's menubar icon sits quietly at the top of the screen until something causes the processor usage to spike and then it lights up red and optionally plays a sound and displays an alert window. You can then quickly use the shortcut in the menu to jump into Activity Monitor and track down the runaway process. Once processor usage returns to normal the alert icon returns to normal too.

The Settings within the app allow you to personalize the usage threshold and time spent at high usage before the alert triggers. You can also select if you want the app to launch at login.

Release notes:
Small bug fix. If you selected to get an alert window then if CPU use was high enough to generate an alert, then dropped low, but then went high again, you would get multiple alert windows. Getting lots of alert windows appearing could be annoying, so now there is only ever one alert window.