Sharp Lynx: System Monitor
CPU temp, fan speed, GPU, RAM
Only for Mac
Free
Live CPU, GPU, memory, network, battery and storage stats right in your menu bar — plus a full dashboard with per-core detail, temperatures and fan speed.
Sharp Lynx keeps your Mac's vitals one glance away.
Formerly SystemPal — same app, same developer, rebuilt from the ground up with a new name, a new design, and far more of your Mac on screen. If you owned SystemPal, this is your update.
Pick the stats you care about and they live in your menu bar — CPU, GPU, memory,
temperature, battery and network, updating every second. Click for a detailed
popover, or open the full dashboard when you want the whole picture.
MENU BAR, YOUR WAY
• Choose exactly which metrics appear, and drag them into the order you want
• Two-line labels so you never have to guess which number is which
• Compact spacing to fit more in a crowded menu bar
• Give the menu bar its own theme, independent of the app
A DASHBOARD THAT ACTUALLY TELLS YOU SOMETHING
• CPU — live load with a stacked user/system chart, per-core bars split into
Performance and Efficiency cores, and 1/5/15-minute load averages
• GPU — utilization and temperature
• Memory — used, plus the App / Wired / Compressed / Free breakdown
• Network — download and upload on opposite sides of the axis, so a busy
upload never hides a busy download
• Storage — capacity per volume and live read/write I/O
• Battery — charge, health, cycle count and power draw
• Top Processes — sort by CPU or memory
PER-COMPONENT DETAIL PAGES
Dedicated pages for CPU, GPU, Memory, Storage, Network, Battery and Sensors,
each with a large live chart and the numbers that matter.
SIX THEMES, LIGHT AND DARK
Multi-color (a semantic color per metric), Dual, Mono Amber, Mono Gray,
Mono Blue and a clean Light theme. The Mono Gray menu bar adapts to your
wallpaper exactly like macOS's own menu bar items.
TEMPERATURES AND FANS
macOS doesn't expose thermal sensors or fan speed to sandboxed App Store apps.
Sharp Lynx reads them through the free Sharp Lynx Helper, a small companion you
download separately from our website — the app will prompt you and can start,
stop and update it for you. Everything else works without it.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
No account. No tracking. No analytics. No network requests. Everything is
measured on your Mac and stays on your Mac.
Built for Apple Silicon Macs, running macOS 14 or later.
more Fixes for macOS 27, and the menu bar popover now says what the battery is doing.
• Network speeds read 0 B/s on macOS 27: macOS stopped giving Sharp Lynx the counters it was reading. It now uses the network interface counters instead, and the speeds are back
• Battery health vanished on macOS 27, where macOS moved the figures it is worked out from. It is back, and is now worked out the way macOS works out the Maximum Capacity it shows
• The menu bar popover names the battery's state in words — Charging, Held at 80%, Losing charge, Full or On battery — with the charging power and the time to full or the time left, the same as the Battery page. Plugged in and still losing charge, it says why
• In the first minute or two after you plug in or unplug, while macOS works out its estimate, Sharp Lynx says it is estimating rather than repeating the state. Plugged in and losing charge, where macOS gives no estimate at all, Sharp Lynx works out roughly how long the battery will last at the current rate
• The battery turns amber when it is running low on battery power, or losing charge while plugged in — no longer while it is charging back up from low
Sharp Lynx now needs Sharp Lynx Helper 1.3, and will offer to update an older one. On recent versions of macOS an older Helper could be stopped from passing its readings to Sharp Lynx, which left temperatures and fan speed blank with nothing on screen to explain why.
Temperatures, fan speed and the full process list come from the Sharp Lynx Helper 1.3 or newer, downloaded separately. Everything else works without it.
Sharp Lynx was previously called SystemPal — same app, same developer.
6.7 28 Sept
A new GPU page, and Sharp Lynx can finally name every process using your CPU.
• The GPU page shows which apps are using the GPU and how much of its time each one is taking — something Activity Monitor has no equivalent for. Alongside it: how much GPU memory is in use, how the work divides between the two halves of the graphics pipeline, and whether the graphics driver has reset
• Top Processes can now list every process on your Mac, not only the ones Sharp Lynx is allowed to inspect by itself. Before this, a busy Mac could show high CPU usage with nothing in the list that explained it. Needs Sharp Lynx Helper 1.2
• When some of the load still can't be accounted for, the CPU card says how much is missing rather than leaving you to assume the list is complete
• Battery now shows charging power in watts and an estimate of the time to full — and tells you when your Mac is plugged in but still losing charge, which is easy to miss and worth knowing
• Sensors: a reading that arrives late is described as late, instead of being treated as a helper that has stopped
Fixed: making the window narrow used to cut off the edges of the interface — the sidebar lost the left half of its labels and the right-hand cards were clipped. The sidebar now stays put and the main area scrolls sideways instead.
Fixed: the Launch at Login switch shows what macOS has actually registered, rather than what was last chosen.
Fixed: the window could stop updating after an update until you logged out and back in.
Also: the dashboard now uses noticeably less CPU while it is open. The same fix is behind both — the interface was being laid out for a size larger than the window, once a second.
Temperatures, fan speed and the full process list come from the Sharp Lynx Helper 1.2 or newer, downloaded separately. Everything else works without it.
Sharp Lynx was previously called SystemPal — same app, same developer.
6.6 27 Aug
Free Up Memory — the feature most asked for in your reviews.
• A Free Up Memory button on the Memory page, the dashboard's Memory card and the menu bar popover. It forces macOS to hand back inactive and cached pages, trading a little disk for free RAM — and it reports what it actually recovered, including "Nothing to free" when there was nothing to gain
• Three strengths in Settings — Standard, Strong, Maximum. Standard stops the moment the system starts pushing back, which measurement says is usually the right place to stop; the stronger levels push further and write more to swap
• "Where the memory is" — a plain-language read of what macOS is doing to fit your apps into your RAM, and which app is the largest single reason it has to. It names the app, not one of its dozens of processes
• "Where the CPU is going" does the same for sustained CPU load, counted in cores rather than percentages. Short bursts never appear — an app is named only once it has held the load
• Swap used is now on the dashboard's Memory card, asked for by name in a review
• The Memory chart is three stacked bands — app, wired and compressed — so you can see which part is growing, not just that memory is
Also: the Memory and CPU pages fit without scrolling and list ten processes each, and the popover names the app behind the processes it lists.
Fixed: the network readings in the menu bar now hold a fixed width, so the row — and every icon to the left of it — stops shifting each time a number gains or loses a digit. Thank you to the reader who wrote in about it.
Temperatures and fan speed come from the Sharp Lynx Helper 1.1 or newer, downloaded separately. Everything else works without it.
Sharp Lynx was previously called SystemPal — same app, same developer.
6.5 20 Aug
Fixes, from a round of auditing the whole app plus reports from you.
• "Pause sampling when idle" in Settings did nothing at all — the setting was being overridden before it was ever read. It now works, so with every window closed Sharp Lynx samples only what your menu bar is showing
• Temperatures can be switched to Fahrenheit everywhere. Almost every reading in the app was built with °C baked in, so the setting only ever changed the menu bar
• When the helper is running but has stopped sending readings, Sharp Lynx now says so and offers to restart it. It used to say the helper "isn't running" and offer a Start button that could not do anything
• The menu bar popover explains when temperatures are unavailable instead of quietly leaving them out
• A fan whose sensor can't be read is no longer reported as "Off"
• Storage: capacity and free space now describe the boot volume rather than whichever drive happened to sort first — an attached external drive could be labelled as this Mac's disk
• Readings that haven't arrived yet show "—" instead of a made-up 0. On launch the app briefly claimed 0% CPU, 0 B/s and 0 GB of memory
• Disk write is one colour throughout, and the CPU card's figures are one size again
Temperatures and fan speed still come from the free Sharp Lynx Helper 1.1 or newer, downloaded separately. Everything else works without it.
Sharp Lynx was previously called SystemPal — same app, same developer.
6.4 6 Aug
The whole dashboard now fits on one screen.
• Top Processes moved beside Storage and Sensors as its own column — ten processes visible without scrolling
• Storage reports how much has been read and written since boot, and its detail page was rebuilt: volume format, capacity, available space and a far larger I/O chart
• The Sensors card now says exactly what the helper is doing — running, stopped, out of date, or not installed — instead of one word for all four
• A helper that needs updating is the only state Sharp Lynx flags for attention, in its own amber. A helper you simply haven't installed no longer looks like an error
• Disk write is one colour everywhere now; it was pink in one place and purple in another
Temperatures and fan speed still come from the free Sharp Lynx Helper 1.1 or newer, downloaded separately. Everything else works without it.
Sharp Lynx was previously called SystemPal — same app, same developer.
6.3 3 Aug
Sharp Lynx was previously called SystemPal — same app, same developer.
• Temperatures and fans: clearer guidance when the free Sharp Lynx Helper isn't installed or needs updating, and Sharp Lynx now starts it for you once it's in place
• Fixed the Battery page briefly claiming a MacBook was a desktop with no battery
• Fixed a duplicate menu bar item that could appear when set to launch at login
• Fixed a rare race between the menu bar and the background service that could interrupt live readings
• Dashboard cards in the middle row now share a height
• Settings shows the real app icon, and no longer claims Intel support (Sharp Lynx is Apple Silicon only)
This version needs Sharp Lynx Helper 1.1 or newer for temperatures and fan speed. Everything else works without it.
6.2 2 Aug
• Fixed a rare race between the menu bar and the background sampling service that could interrupt live readings
• Fixed a duplicate menu bar item that could appear when Sharp Lynx was set to launch at login
6.1 1 Aug
Sharp Lynx is a complete rebuild of SystemPal — new name, new design, and far more of your Mac on screen.
• Brand-new menu bar: choose and reorder your metrics, two-line labels, compact spacing, and its own theme
• New dashboard with CPU (per-core P/E bars, stacked user/system chart, load averages), GPU, memory, network, storage, battery and sensors
• Dedicated detail pages for every component
• Six themes including a true Light mode
• Network and disk charts now split the two directions across the axis so neither hides the other
• Temperatures and fan speed via the new free Sharp Lynx Helper
• Rebuilt as three cooperating processes so the menu bar stays responsive and idle CPU use stays low
6.0 28 Jul
1. Made the UI look good. Supports macOS Sierra.
2. Supported macOS dark mode!
3. Removed mini music player’s ugly background.
4. Made other minor fixes.
5. The Contact Developer email will have the diagnosis info which does not contain any personal info and helps us solve problems. You can remove it if you don’t want to share it to us.
6. Because the per-process network monitoring does not work well on macOS Sierra, we have removed this feature.
5.2 17/10/2016
New in version 5.1:
1. Fixed the minor UI issues.
New in version 5.0:
1. Improved display for Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
2. Added an option to disable the auto-clean notification.
3. Added top processes which consume network bandwidth.
4. Added the functionality of terminating a process directly.
5. Added an option to play alert sound when the CPU temperature is too high.
6. Removed the message box about rating.
5.1 03/02/2015
1. Improved display for Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
2. Added an option to disable the auto-clean notification.
3. Added top processes which consume network bandwidth.
4. Added the functionality of terminating a process directly.
5. Added an option to play alert sound when the CPU temperature is too high.
6. Removed the message box about rating.
5.0 12/01/2015
1. When cleaning memory automatically, SystemPal does not show the popover window any more.
2. Fixed the rare crash when SystemPal cleans memory.
4.1 01/04/2014
1. Added disk reading/writing status.
2. Greatly increased the speed of cleaning memory. Now it can finish cleaning in a couple of seconds.
3. Fixed the progress bar of mini music player.
4. Disabled auto-hide/show popover windows by default. (The existing users can disable them in the Preferences.)
5. Fixed email address.
4.0 22/01/2014
1. Fixed the temperature problem on Macbook Air/Pro/Retina Mid 2012 models.
2. Fixed the problem of mini iTunes player. It will show the song and artist only when iTunes is playing.
3. Supports retina display
3.2 01/08/2012
1. Added a button on Mini Music Player popover window to turn off Mini Music Player.
2. Minor bug fixes.
3.1 09/02/2012
1. Added a mini music player on the status bar. This mini music player controls iTunes to play songs in your iTunes library. It is very convenient to see song name and artist on the status bar. You can also check the album artwork, read the lyrics, rate the song. When you close iTunes, the mini music player will just become a tiny icon.
2. Added a screen shot utility. You can use it to capture mouse selection, capture a window, capture the whole screen. You can save the screen shot to desktop or save to the clipboard. You also have the option to delay 3 seconds before capturing.
3. Added a quick launch for Activity Monitor of Mac OS X.
4. When the popover window shows, you will not lose the focus from the current app any more.
5. When the mouse enters the icon on the status bar, the popover window will show automatically.
6. Revised the UI.
7. Added a menu item to send emails to developer to report bugs or request new features.
8. Fixed a crashing bug.
3.0 12/01/2012
v2.3 Fixed the memory leak. The previous version of SystemPal consumes more than 100MB of RAM after running for 24 hours. Now this problem was fixed and SystemPal consumes only 10MB of RAM.
v2.2
Displays network status (uploading speed and downloading speed).
You can choose the items displaying on the status bar.
Supports auto-cleaning memory. If the free memory is smaller than a certain number, SystemPal will begin to clean memory automatically.
Optimized code to minimize the CPU time.
Several users reported the new version of SystemPal does not run. Please follow these steps to solve this problem:
1. Press shift+command+G in Finder, input ~/Library/Preferences
2. Delete com.vincesoft.macmemorytool.plist and run SystemPal again.
If your existing app is MemoryTool 1.0, please follow the steps to delete the old app and update (due to a bug of Mac App Store):
1. Quit MemoryTool
2. Open LaunchPad. Push and hold the mouse left button on MemoryTool icon, and then delete this app.
3. Go to Mac App Store -> Purchases. Click the 'Install' button to install SystemPal. (If there is no 'Install' button, click SystemPal icon and then click the 'Install' button under SystemPal icon.)
2.3 21/12/2011
Displays network status (uploading speed and downloading speed).
You can choose the items displaying on the status bar.
Supports auto-cleaning memory. If the free memory is smaller than a certain number, SystemPal will begin to clean memory automatically.
Optimized code to minimize the CPU time.
Several users reported the new version of SystemPal does not run. Please follow these steps to solve this problem:
1. Press shift+command+G in Finder, input ~/Library/Preferences
2. Delete com.vincesoft.macmemorytool.plist and run SystemPal again.
If your existing app is MemoryTool 1.0, please follow the steps to delete the old app and update (due to a bug of Mac App Store):
1. Quit MemoryTool
2. Open LaunchPad. Push and hold the mouse left button on MemoryTool icon, and then delete this app.
3. Go to Mac App Store -> Purchases. Click the 'Install' button to install SystemPal. (If there is no 'Install' button, click SystemPal icon and then click the 'Install' button under SystemPal icon.)
2.2 14/12/2011
Fixed the wrong memory usage info on a Mac with 8GB RAM.
If your existing app is SystemPal 2.0, you can update directly.
If your existing app is MemoryTool 1.0, please follow the steps to delete the old app and update (due to a bug of Mac App Store):
1. Quit MemoryTool
2. Open LaunchPad. Push and hold the mouse left button on MemoryTool icon, and then delete this app.
3. Go to Mac App Store -> Purchases. Click the 'Install' button to install SystemPal. (If there is no 'Install' button, click SystemPal icon and then click the 'Install' button under SystemPal icon.)
2.1 27/09/2011
MemoryTool has a new name SystemPal. It displays not only memory usage, but also CPU load, CPU temperature and CPU fan speed. It is the best app to monitor your computer status.
Important Notes:
If you failed to update (probably it is a bug of Mac App Store), please follow the steps to delete the old app and update:
1. Quit MemoryTool
2. Open LaunchPad. Push and hold the mouse left button on MemoryTool icon, and then delete this app.
3. Go to Mac App Store -> Purchases. Click the 'Install' button to install SystemPal. (If there is no 'Install' button, click SystemPal icon and then click the 'Install' button under SystemPal icon.)
2.0 21/09/2011
Fixes for macOS 27, and the menu bar popover now says what the battery is doing.
• Network speeds read 0 B/s on macOS 27: macOS stopped giving Sharp Lynx the counters it was reading. It now uses the network interface counters instead, and the speeds are back
• Battery health vanished on macOS 27, where macOS moved the figures it is worked out from. It is back, and is now worked out the way macOS works out the Maximum Capacity it shows
• The menu bar popover names the battery's state in words — Charging, Held at 80%, Losing charge, Full or On battery — with the charging power and the time to full or the time left, the same as the Battery page. Plugged in and still losing charge, it says why
• In the first minute or two after you plug in or unplug, while macOS works out its estimate, Sharp Lynx says it is estimating rather than repeating the state. Plugged in and losing charge, where macOS gives no estimate at all, Sharp Lynx works out roughly how long the battery will last at the current rate
• The battery turns amber when it is running low on battery power, or losing charge while plugged in — no longer while it is charging back up from low
Sharp Lynx now needs Sharp Lynx Helper 1.3, and will offer to update an older one. On recent versions of macOS an older Helper could be stopped from passing its readings to Sharp Lynx, which left temperatures and fan speed blank with nothing on screen to explain why.
Temperatures, fan speed and the full process list come from the Sharp Lynx Helper 1.3 or newer, downloaded separately. Everything else works without it.
Sharp Lynx was previously called SystemPal — same app, same developer.
more Version 6.7 28 Sept
Data Not Collected The developer does not collect any data from this app.