How Vitals monitors your Mac without slowing it down.
Most monitoring utilities are bulky Electron wrappers or background Python daemons that consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM and spike your CPU just to report CPU usage. Vitals was built differently: it monitors your Mac in real time without slowing it down, using 100% native Swift, Mach subroutines, and zero cloud telemetry.
Direct Mach Kernel Calls< 0.1% CPU
Instead of spawning shell commands like top or vm_stat, Vitals taps directly into Mach kernel APIs: host_statistics64, processor_info, and proc_pidinfo. Each sample costs a handful of kernel calls that return in well under a millisecond, so Vitals can keep the readout live with negligible CPU overhead and minimal battery drain.
Local LLM & VRAM ProfilingApple Silicon
Running local AI models with Ollama, LM Studio, or llama.cpp? Vitals tracks unified-memory VRAM headroom and active model footprints so you know when a model will start swapping, and runs an on-demand speed test that reports real tokens/sec — using the server’s own timing where it reports one.
Per-Core Cluster TelemetryHardware
Inspect how macOS distributes threads across your Mac’s core tiers in real time. Vitals reads the tier names macOS itself publishes via hw.perflevelN rather than guessing from the core count, so Performance and Efficiency cores — and the third tier M5-generation chips introduced — are each labelled correctly. A throttling timeline names the app that triggered it.
Battery Vampire DetectionSmart Alerts
Identifies runaway background processes and apps preventing sleep. Vitals tracks system power draw in live watts and flags excessive drain when running on battery before you leave your desk.
host_processor_info() for per-core loads, vm_statistics64() for memory pressure, and IOReport for Apple Silicon energy telemetry.~/Library/Application Support/Vitals — no database engine, nothing hidden. Up to 30 days of metrics charted locally, never synced to iCloud and never uploaded. Open it, move it, or delete it; deleting it just clears your charts.The one connection Vitals opens on its own is the Internet-health probe: a TCP handshake to
1.1.1.1 every five seconds that carries no payload, and only while Pro is unlocked. It exists to measure latency, jitter and packet loss. Every other outbound feature runs only when you press it. Full accounting in the Privacy Policy.