Activity Monitor data, in recent history? Lately my MacBook Pro has a lot of moments where it slows down for a few seconds, stops responding to keys and touchpad, displays a rainbow wheel of doom, and then comes back. If I go to the Activity Monitor program, I see something like this:



The CPU was just getting loaded by something, but now it's not there, so I can't see what it was. It's hard to get to the Activity Monitor quickly when it's happening, because the entire system is slow and unresponsive.

I wish there were a way to click on those blue peaks and see the CPU usage data at that point in time. Anyone know a way to do something like that? In other words, a way to find out: "What was bogging my computer down 10 seconds ago?"
Instruments.app can be used to profile Activity monitor data. But this is not viable for constant background usage as this itself might lead to the beachball. I haven't used it a lot, but see if you can find how to reduce the data collection.