QUESTION :
I have a MacBook Pro with OS X Snow Leopard. Occasionally some applications start to hog CPU usage at 100% or even more and overheat the system. Having a look at the Activity Monitor at the right time can give us hints about the problematic application but sometimes this is not that easy.
Is there a program that can constantly log or dump data from the Activity Monitor and fan RPM to disk so that later we can review it and study which applications are using resources the most on average?
ANSWER :
The Hardware Monitor from Marcel Bresink has a command line interface to dump these hardware details. See the second link as he has several versions of the programs, remote monitoring, a dashboard widget, etc… Most you can download and run for free but have to pay for full access to all the hardware issues.