I'm saying you don't, if you don't want to see them. Usually there's some menu bar icon that's configurable. But you do want to keep them running for the histor

I'm saying you don't, if you don't want to see them. Usually there's some menu bar icon that's configurable. But you do want to keep them running for the history and for the quick accessibility. There is indeed a performance cost. My experience is the good third party options are less resource intensive than the system option, but YMMW and there are a lot of options out there making all kinds of tradeoffs. That said, there are definitely people who want to run a powerful and GUI-rich system stats tool and don't mind seeing graphs in the corner of their eye all day and giving up 5% of resources to run it. I'd venture most of us are running something that another person doesn't see the point in using.