Os x system monitor7/5/2023 This example is taken from an Intel Mac with eight cores, and (as is typical) shows what appear to be 16 cores. There are two other CPU windows which are also of great use, opened from the Window menu: CPU Usage and CPU History.ĬPU Usage simply shows the loading on each core at an instant, when Activity Monitor was sampling for its last update. Finally, the … tool offers some more specialist features in its popup menu, which can be useful when that process is in trouble. That file listing can be invaluable when you’re trying to track Property Lists, dylibs, and other items which an app may have open. The tool with an i provides a useful window of information, including memory use, detailed statistics, and a list of open files and ports. Some users love exercising this power in Activity Monitor, but unless you know what you’re doing you can easily cause problems. Select one of these processes and there are several things you can do with it: the tool with an X in it can force the process to quit. So a high %CPU here isn’t a symptom of overheating, but of one of the response measures your Mac uses to try to stay cool. But kernel_task is used by your Mac’s Core Duet and environmental control system to block processor cores when they’re hot and overloaded. Of course that process is always running, and its CPU Time should be one of the longest in the list. The other is the hot Mac with an unusually high %CPU for kernel_task. As relative measurements go, %CPU seems fairly quantitative and accurate. On a Mac with 8 cores, don’t be surprised to see processes with 400% or more in their %CPU, indicating that they’re loading most or all of the cores very heavily indeed. Most of us assume that %CPU should total 100, but the units here aren’t that precise, and refer more to the total core capacity. There are just two catches which still cause trouble. Most of this information is fairly straightforward to interpret. The box at the foot of this window provides some useful global indicators of total CPU use and idle time, a basic plot of total CPU load over time, and the total number of threads and processes. If you’re only interested in user processes, then turn off the clutter of All Processes, for instance. You can also customise which processes get listed in this window, using the View menu. One snag of doing that is that the order keeps changing, of course. Click in its header once to sort the list of processes into order with the highest %CPU at the top. In most cases, the defaults are an excellent start, and the %CPU column the most significant to watch. You can customise which fields are shown by Control-clicking in the column headers, which pops up the menu of items you can include, and you can drag and drop the columns into the order that you want. The main window lists active processes and key values which normally include %CPU, CPU Time, Threads and more. Understanding what you see is the next challenge. All you have to do is open Activity Monitor and select its CPU view. Unlike the log, access provided by Activity Monitor is excellent only developers with Xcode’s performance tools have any better, and then only for their own code. This article looks at using the latter to learn more about what your Mac’s processor cores are up to, and what might be causing it problems. For observing Macs and macOS there are two major tools: the Unified Log, which unfortunately is still poorly supported by the bundled browser, and Activity Monitor. gfxCardStatus, a specialized utility specifically for MacBook Pros with multiple GPUs.If you want to know about anything, start by observation.NoFinder, a similar standalone utility for classic Mac OS, with the ability to force quit applications, including the Finder.About This Macintosh., a built-in option in classic Mac OS ( 4.2 and up) to check memory usage.Startup drive > Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.If needed, the Dock icon can be switched to keep an eye on the specific usage. Finally, there is an option to quit or force quit an application (unresponsive processes are displayed in red).ĬPU, System Memory, Disk Activity, Disk Usage and Network usage can be viewed in the tabbed lower part of the window, where the activity is presented in a real-time chart as dotted bar graphs. There are options to filter what is listed, and the process list can also be saved and be exported. Using this utility can be useful to inspect which individual processes are drawing heavily on the Mac's resources, such as graphics, video editing, or even a complex web page. This can be used to monitor the Mac's processor and disk activity, as well as the memory usage and network activity. Activity Monitor measures how resources are being used by different applications (or background processes) on a Macintosh.
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