"Beware" , iStatMenus 4(.0.2)

I got a Mac Mini 10 days ago, got it synced with my old Powerbook, imported lots of data (Migration Assistant) and had some troubles.
Many imported Apps and Others like internet plug-ins/Contextual Menu Items where PPC only and I cleaned them out.

All the while using iStat Menus, almost from the beginning.
Now, the disk activity light annoyed me like hell, it was off for 2-4 seconds and then on for 2--3-4 seconds, this was all the time, through the whole day.
Getting sick of this and I thought I needed a reinstall, the bad thing is though it's a 4-5 GB download and I am on a limited internet connection, capped at 3 GB a month.

So, yesterday I made a new account and still the same there, today I went ahead and "investigated" further.
The light was always in sync with the MDS process so I thought this was the culprit.
I looked on the internet and found a way to disable it but still had those annoying writes every couple of seconds.
I also have MenuMeters and when I switched of all Menu Items in iStatMenus it was gone.
MDS was reindexing the disk before this but after that stopped the light where out.
If I switched on both the disk indicator in MenuMeters and iStatMenus I could clearly see the write lights on much longer than iStatMenus, several seconds compared to just 1 or two blips in MenuMeters, even after setting it to fast in iStatMenus.

There seems to be a bug in iStatMenus, together with the MDS process, it's always in sync.
Now, why does iStatMenus have to write to the disk every few seconds, I know it logs things into history but does that need to be updated to the disk every few seconds?
Every Minute would be enough or even less.
I tried iStatMenus before, version 2 and 3 and they did not have this problem on my powerbook, the powerbook when it was idle also almost never writes to the disk.
It's not that the disk will have problems with it, it's just annoying, now if I had an SSD, which I will install along the road I don't want to have a program which continuously writes to disk.

I would like to know if more people see these almost continuous writes to the disk while using iStatMenus.

So, in the end the misery is over and no need to download ML on a limited capped internet, the last thing I also don't understand btw, why not have a complete OS X Installer on the Recovery HD, it's now 1 GB, a complete installer would be something like 5 GB, understandable for an 64 GB Air but not for a 500 GB disk.

Bjango said:

iStat Menus 4 writes history logs to disk. In iStat Menus 4.04, we changed the writing to be cached, so it happens far less frequently.



We didn't have logs before iStat Menus 4.

As with all of iStat Menus, we'll continue to refine and improve the way writing the logs happens. You're not the first to mention this, so it's definitely on our radar.

Thanks for the feedback! We hope you like iStat Menus, despite this issue.

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Thanks for the reply, the Title was a bit exaggerated but I did use " "

Good it's taken care off, it drove me mad, normally I would know what the problem is if I installed something but I moved to a new Mac from an old Powerbook so I was pretty sure it was this which was causing it, but it was iStatMenus, glad you took care of it, I will look into it (update) and see how it goes.

One remark, in the contact Tab on your site you list Twiiter and app.net, App.net wants money to Join or do I miss something here, if I am right this isn't really consumer friendly.

Cheers Perry

Bjango said:

We answer support questions wherever they might happen to be, but the most direct ways are via our site (with replies via email), Twitter or App.net. App.net is a new service that's mostly paid, although a free tier was announced yesterday. We have no affiliation with App.net... we're just customers there, like everyone else. It's a nice service though. Due to the longer messages than Twitter, it can be a good place to help users of our apps.

Click to expand...

Sadly this wasn't any better, might be due to me importing all the old stuff, I am in no position to download 4-5 GB for Mountain Lion to start over again.
I will see later when I do a fresh install again.
For now it is annoying me too much to have it installed.

I know how to install it, and I did not look for an uninstaller, if there is none I would suggest to make one since this installs a LaunchAgent and LaunchDeamon.