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I'm about to purchase a new macbook pro since mine is beginning to show signs of early death (hardware failure, not worth fixing, its an old laptop from the first generation of MBPs).

I'm not sure whether I should invest my money in a more powerful CPU, more memory or maybe an SSD HD. To figure out where my performance bottlenecks are I'd like to build a profile of my current laptop which will give me an indication, over a period of time, where my laptop lags the most.

I know there are plenty of applications for monitoring, but that only shows me where the problems are right now - they dont give me an overall picture of "what impacts my laptop's performance the most over a period of a week, or so".

Any help will be appreciated :) Thanks

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I'd use XBench or GeekBench to determine where your hardware bottlenecks are, but you'll likely learn what you already know: HDDs are slow and your processor is old.

As for an extended profile of your usage habits, I'm unsure of the benefit that you're expecting to derive. All well-written Mac apps will not leak memory and will idle when not in use, so the idea that programs are causing usage-based and time dependent lags seems odd. System performance would be a function of what programs you're using, having little or nothing to do with the time of day.

To answer your question directly I'd write a script to call "ps ux" periodically and graph the results in Excel.

Andrew
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