Activity monitor shows Billions of messages - activitymonitord & kernel_task?

I'm seeing Billions of messages on activitymonitord and kernel_task after 1 day of uptime.  Is this something to be worried about?  Is it related to the >240GB virtual memory size?  Yes, I leave activity monitor running to show me the memory use in the dock icon.  That's probably why it's messages are so high.  Is it a good practice to leave activity monitor running all the time - i.e. for the disk drive?

Messages are simply communications sent between tasks (programs), and are tracked. Activity monitor has to continuously poll tasks and the kernel to determine what their states are and issue the statistics you see, so it will have one of the higher rates of message throughput than almost any other program.
Message counts are cumulative, and start when a specific program is run, so if you have kept Activity Monitor on continually for over a day then it can very easily get up to billions of messages sent. In keeping mine on for the ~10 minute duration of typing this reply it has jumped to 31 million messages.
The virtual memory size is also well within the expected range. My current VM size for a system with 16GB RAM is 497GB.
Overall, it looks like everything's running as expected.

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