Utility to warn when process takes 100% CPU for x minutes? I run on battery a lot and occasionally a process/app will crash in the background and start sucking up 100% of one or more cores.  That in turn burns my battery down way faster than normal.   I used to notice this because my iStat Menu graph would go solid, but now with 8 cores and often only one pegged it's not as obvious.

I'm wondering if there's a utility/watcher that would pop up a dialog warning if a process took up 100% of a core for more than 5-10 seconds?  That way I could decide if it was OK to let run (ie. compile/render) or I should manually kill it (ie. app crashed).

I vaguely recall something like this years ago but haven't been able to find it.
I don't know if it will accept a time frame as a parameter, but atMonitor definitely will provide Growl notifications based upon specific criteria.

Triggers
Triggers can be setup to activate any script when a predefined value reaches its target. For example, a script could be written to email system administrator when the CPU usage goes above 90%. Two sample scripts, one basic and the other one a little bit more advanced using GROWL, are included.