#FIND ACTIVITY MONITOR ON MAC MAC OS X#

Here’s how you can use both to monitor Mac OS X processes like a professional. When it’s necessary to troubleshoot performance by tracking active processes and determining whether a runaway or frozen application or process is overwhelming the system, a couple options exist: Activity Monitor and the command line. Just as with other platforms, occasional issues arise. You can sort by “Sent Bytes” or “Received Bytes” to see which apps have been the most active.Erik Eckel goes over the basics of using Mac's Activity Monitor and the command line to monitor processes on Mac OS X.

Click the “Network” tab up top to reveal a table showing how much communicating each of your applications is doing. If your Internet connection has suddenly ground to a halt, it might be because applications are using more than their share of bandwidth. Click the “Memory” column to sort by the most memory-intensive applications and then start shutting things down.įind Applications Using Internet Bandwidth Of course, if you can’t get more RAM, you can also quit RAM-hogging applications from Activity Monitor. If you see something more like the screenshot below, you’re in good shape. That slows your system down significantly, and it probably means you don’t have enough RAM to support your current workflow. If that’s a high number, it means you computer is constantly using slow hard disk storage to fill in for insufficient memory. You also want to check out the “Swap Used” field at the bottom of the center column. If that’s yellow or red, that means your system is running low on memory. You’re looking for the Memory Pressure graph on the right. This lets you know you need to force quit the application.Ĭlick the “Memory” tab up top and take a look at the graph at the bottom of the window. For easy identification, a hung application’s name will turn red, and the text “Not Responding” will appear in parentheses. Since Activity Monitor lets you see everything that’s currently running, it makes it easy to quickly identify applications that have hung or crashed and need to be put out of their misery. The most common use of Activity Monitor is probably force-quitting applications. As you change tabs, this graph will change to reflect relevant information. For CPU you’ll see a split between system processes and user processes. Click on a category to reveal the list showing their current allocation by process.Īlong the bottom of the window you’ll see a graphical representation of the current resource allocation and some high-level statistics. These tabs show resource use data for each of those categories. Activity Monitor provides some much-needed visibility into what the heck your computer is doing.Īt the top of the window you’ll find five tabs: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk and Network. You can’t easily see that information in many other places in macOS. It doesn’t just show user applications either – you’ll also see system processes and daemons, which is huge. In the default view, Activity Monitor provides a table of all the currently-running applications and the amount of CPU “space” they’re taking up. You can also find the application at “Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor.app.” Getting Acquainted with Activity Monitor To launch Activity Monitor, type the application’s name into Spotlight or Launchpad.

Find activity monitor on mac