Find the process that's quietly cooking your CPU. CorePulse watches per-core load over time and names the app behind the sustained usage that heats your machine and spins up your fans.
Every CPU monitor shows you the overall load. But overall load hides the problem that actually heats your machine: a single process quietly holding a core busy for a long time.
Here's the real story that inspired CorePulse: an open editor was using just 20–30% of one core — nothing alarming on any usual monitor — yet it kept the CPU warm enough that the liquid-cooling fans spun up and stayed loud. The overall load looked fine. Task Manager, sorted by momentary CPU, never pointed at it. The culprit was hiding in plain sight because it was steady, not spiky.
CorePulse looks at load over time, per core, and attributes it to a process. It surfaces the quiet, sustained CPU consumers — the ones that don't spike but never let go — and names them. So when your fans won't calm down, you open CorePulse and immediately see what is keeping your cores warm.
It also raises a notification when a core stays under heavy load for too long, again naming the responsible process — so acute spikes get your attention too.
The tray icon is live (redrawn ~8×/second) and always leads with the load of your hottest core as a large number. Pick the look you like:
The number is the current load, but the color reflects how long a core has stayed hot — so a brief spike doesn't cry wolf. A momentary jump to 100% stays green; a core that keeps holding warms from green → yellow → red and finally pulses when it crosses your alert duration. That's the whole point: CorePulse reacts to sustained load, not noise.
| Style | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Ring + % | Ring gauge of the hottest core + big number. Most legible at tiny tray sizes. (default) |
| Segmented ring | One segment per core (see them all at a glance), hottest highlighted, its % in the center. |
| Speedometer | 270° gauge — the familiar dashboard metaphor. |
| Liquid + % | A container that fills to the load level with an animated wave. |
| Dots grid | A dot per core; each dot fills and colors by its load. |
- 🎯 Per-core monitoring — tracks every logical core, not just the overall average.
- 📜 Usage history — a Top offenders (this session) ranking by accumulated core-time surfaces the quiet, steady consumers (the editor at 25% that never lets go), plus a saved log of past alerts.
- 🔔 Sustained-load alerts — fires only when a core stays above your threshold for a set duration, with hysteresis and a per-core cooldown to avoid spam. Threshold goes as low as 10% to catch moderate-but-constant load.
- 🕵️ Culprit detection — every alert names the top processes likely responsible, with their CPU share.
- 📊 Informative live tray icon — five modern styles, hottest-core load front and center, with color driven by duration so brief spikes stay calm and only sustained load warms to red.
- 🌍 8 languages — auto-detected from your system, switchable in settings.
- 🚀 Lightweight & no admin rights — a single tray app, no drivers, no elevation.
- ⚙️ Configurable — threshold, duration, cooldown, poll interval, notifications on/off, autostart.
- 🖱️ One-click Task Manager — jump straight to the culprit from the notification.
Right-click the tray icon → History. The Top offenders tab ranks every process by the CPU core-time it has accumulated this session — so a process steadily using a fraction of a core climbs the list over time and gives itself away, even though it never spikes. Above it, a timeline of the hottest core makes the difference obvious: a sustained offender shows a flat shelf, a real spike is just a thin blip. The Alerts tab keeps a saved log of past sustained-load events and their culprits.
Requirements: Windows 10 or 11, .NET 10 Runtime (the Desktop Runtime).
git clone <your-fork-url> CorePulse
cd CorePulse
dotnet run --project src/CpuMonitorNotifierdotnet publish src/CpuMonitorNotifier -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false- Look at the tray icon: the number is your hottest core's load; the color tells you how hot.
- Hover for a tooltip: hottest core, overall CPU, and the greediest process.
- Right-click the icon (or double-click) for Settings — choose the icon style, language, alert threshold/duration/cooldown, poll interval, notifications, and autostart.
- History in the menu opens the offenders ranking and alert log (see above).
- Test notification in the menu fires a sample toast right away — handy to confirm notifications aren't being swallowed by Windows Focus Assist / Do Not Disturb.
Windows doesn't expose per-process, per-core CPU statistics without ETW (which needs administrator rights). CorePulse uses a heuristic that's accurate for the case that matters most:
- Every second it samples each process's total CPU time and computes the delta — each process's load expressed in cores (1.0 = one fully-busy core).
- When a core alerts, it surfaces the processes whose consumption matches the number of saturated cores.
- For the classic scenario — a hung single-threaded process holding one core at 100% — the guess is effectively exact.
See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full design, and docs/ANALOGS.md for how CorePulse compares to existing tools.
Auto-detected from your system locale, or pick one explicitly in Settings:
🇬🇧 English · 🇷🇺 Русский · 🇩🇪 Deutsch · 🇪🇸 Español · 🇫🇷 Français · 🇧🇷 Português · 🇨🇳 中文 · 🇯🇵 日本語
Adding a language is a single dictionary in Localization.cs — pull requests welcome.
No existing tool combines all three of per-core visualization, sustained-load alerting, and culprit naming in one lightweight app:
| Per-core | Live tray icon | Sustained-load alerts | Names the culprit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task Manager tray icon | ✗ | minimal | ✗ | ✗ |
| XMeters | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Process Lasso | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ (by process) | ✓ |
| HWiNFO | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ (sensor thresholds) | ✗ |
| CorePulse | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ (per core) | ✓ |
Full breakdown in docs/ANALOGS.md.
- Precise per-core → per-process attribution via ETW CPU sampling (opt-in, requires elevation).
- Optional history graph / mini-sparkline in the tooltip.
- Portable single-file self-contained build.
C# · .NET 10 · WinForms tray host · GDI+ rendering · Windows Toast notifications
(Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.Notifications) · PDH performance counters (Processor Information).
MIT © 2026 Denis Esis