What starts when you log in, and the three chores you used to need Terminal for

Two questions people ask about a slow Mac are "what is running right now" and "what started without my asking". The Performance module answers both on one screen, and then offers the three maintenance jobs that otherwise mean opening Terminal and typing a command you half remember.

The live card

The top of the screen refreshes every three seconds. Bars for CPU, memory and disk, with memory shown as "X of Y used" and disk as "X free of Y"; they turn to a warning colour above 85 percent for CPU and memory and 90 percent for disk. Beneath them, tiles for download and upload throughput, free memory, CPU cores, load, battery percentage with a bolt while charging, battery temperature, thermal state and uptime. The battery tiles only appear on a Mac that has one.

This is a monitor, not an optimiser. It shows what macOS reports so you can see whether the fan is spinning because of a stuck process or because the room is warm.

Login items

Under the heading "Login items (N)" is the list of launch agents in your own account's LaunchAgents folder: the things that start when you log in, each with its name, the program it runs and a Disable button. Disabling moves the agent's file to the Trash, so it does not start at next login, and the result bar offers Undo. If the list is empty, the screen says "Nothing extra launches at login."

Below that, a collapsible section lists the system agents and daemons in the shared Library folders. These are shown with a lock icon and cannot be changed from here, because macOS and the apps that installed them with administrator rights manage them. Showing them read-only is deliberate: you can see what is there without the app offering to pull a thread it cannot put back.

A long list of login items is also one of the inputs to the Mac Health score, which flags more than four as worth reviewing and more than eight as a problem. This is where you fix it.

The three chores

The Maintenance card has three buttons, each of which does one thing that needs administrator rights.

Free up memory purges inactive memory, the same as the purge command, so more is immediately free for whatever you open next. Flush DNS cache resets the resolver, which is the fix for a site that will not load after its address changed. Run maintenance scripts runs the daily, weekly and monthly scripts that macOS schedules itself but can skip on a laptop that is asleep at the scheduled hour.

None of these is magic, and the app does not pretend otherwise. macOS manages memory well without help, DNS problems are rarer than forum posts suggest, and the periodic scripts mostly rotate logs. They are here because when you do need them, the alternative is Terminal and a password prompt anyway.

The helper, and why it needs a signed build

Each of the three actions needs administrator rights. Without anything installed, macOS asks for your password every time you press a button. With SweepyMac's background helper installed, they run silently.

The helper is a small privileged service that does exactly those jobs and nothing else. You install it from the Maintenance card; if macOS wants approval, a button opens Login Items in System Settings where you enable it. A status pill shows the state: Helper installed, Needs approval, Not installed or Unavailable. Remove helper uninstalls it again.

It shows Unavailable on an unsigned build, and that is by design. macOS only lets a privileged helper install when it is signed with a Developer ID and matches the app that embeds it, which means a tampered copy of SweepyMac cannot carry a working helper. On a build where it is unavailable, the three tasks fall back to the password prompt. We would rather have that fallback than a helper that could be installed by anything.

What this module does not do

It does not kill processes, change CPU priorities or promise a speed boost. The Performance screen is for seeing clearly and then doing one of three well-understood things. If the real problem is a full disk, the live card's disk bar will say so and the fix is in Cleanup; if it is a worn battery, the fix is on the Battery screen and it is not software.