How long does a system monitor keep its history?
Pulse by Zaweba keeps a one-minute history for 30 days by default, and you can choose anything from 1 to 365 days in its Settings.
It varies a lot between monitors, and many keep none at all. Pulse by Zaweba keeps a one-minute history for 30 days by default, and you can set any length from 1 to 365 days in Settings > History. The same page shows how many minutes have been recorded so far.
Windows' own Task Manager keeps very little; its App history tab covers some figures, but its live graphs only go back a minute or so. Pulse was built around the idea that the useful questions are usually about the past.
What one minute of history holds
Every minute Pulse writes a summary into a local SQLite file, history.db in %APPDATA%\Zaweba\Pulse. It stores the machine's CPU, memory, GPU, network and disk use, each busy app's CPU seconds, network and disk bytes and peak memory, and each sensor's peak and average.
That's enough to rebuild a clear picture of any day: when the PC was busy, which apps did the work, which used the data, and how hot things got. It isn't a second-by-second recording, so it's compact. A minute is fine enough to match a spike to what you were doing and coarse enough to keep the file small.
Choosing how long to keep
Thirty days covers most needs. It reaches back past the last billing period on a metered connection and covers anything you're likely to remember noticing. Shorter is fine if you only care about yesterday. Longer makes sense if you want to compare this month with a few months ago, or track something slow, like a PC that seems to have got hotter since the summer. Settings > History takes any value from 1 to 365 days.
Older minutes are dropped as new ones are added, so the file doesn't grow for ever.
Looking back
The History page (Ctrl+3) has a Show selector for Today, Yesterday and This week. Each shows a CPU and memory graph and a network graph with totals, plus lists of the top bandwidth users, top CPU users and temperature peaks with the three busiest apps in that minute. Pulse also stores Windows' hourly per-app data-usage records, so the bandwidth list works even without live per-app network counting.
History only exists if the monitor was running
A record is only as good as its coverage. Pulse keeps recording while its window is closed, because it stays in the tray. Tick "Start Pulse when I sign in" in Settings and it starts in the tray at every sign-in, so the history has no gaps. In the background it is light, about 0.1 per cent CPU and 70 MB on the test PC.
Your history stays yours
Pulse's history never leaves the PC. There's no account and no cloud copy, and nothing is sent anywhere. Help > How Pulse measures things says so in plain words, and the file sits in your own AppData folder. Pulse by Zaweba keeps your PC's past where it belongs: on your PC.
