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The Activity Monitor app can be used to troubleshoot your Mac, as well as evaluate how well your Mac is performing overall or with specific running processes (apps). In Using Activity Monitor Part 2, weâll take a look at using this utility to explore your Macâs energy use, disk performance, and network performance.
In Activity Monitor Part 1, we looked at the basics of using the app, and examined how to use the app to monitor CPU and RAM utilization. If youâre not familiar with how to use Activity Monitor, you may want to take a few moments to check out Using Activity Monitor Part 1: CPU and Memory.
With the Activity Monitor app in macOS, you can force quit misbehaving apps, find out how much energy your Mac is using, and see which apps or processes are eating the most processor cycles.
Energy Tab in Activity Monitor
The Energy tab measures the overall energy use of your Mac, as well as on a per process (app) basis. For those of us with MacBooks, the Energy section of Activity Monitor can help us manage the MacBookâs battery runtime by discovering which processes are using excessive amounts of the batteryâs energy.
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The Energy tab is also useful for those of us with desktop Macs, or who have our MacBooks plugged into the mains (AC). In those cases, the Energy tab can help us discover processes that are using a lot of energy and likely causing our Macs to heat up and run the internal fans, with an annoying high-speed whine.
The Energy tab displays a hierarchical view of processes, with related processes displayed together. An example: If you have multiple Safari pages open (and who doesnât?), they will show up as a single âSafariâ process. But the process can be expanded by clicking on its disclosure triangle to reveal each individual Safari process that is running.
This allows you to dig down through related processes to find the one thatâs the energy hog. It also helps keep the tab well organized.
Activity Monitor displays how each group and individual process is affecting your Macâs energy use using the following categories:
At the bottom of the display youâll see overall totals for energy in the following categories:
Note: The energy categories shown are dependent on the type of Mac you have and the hardware it contains.
About Energy Impact and Avg Energy Impact: Apple has to do some guesswork to determine the amount of energy used on a process-by-process basis. There is no hardware within the Mac that can directly make these types of measurements, but it can be derived from measuring CPU and GPU impact, as well as wakeup impact and App Nap impact. There are also disk and network impacts that have to be included to produce the Energy Impact and Avg Energy Impact numbers.
You should only use the Energy Impact numbers as a guide, and not an exact representation of energy consumed by a process.
Disk Tab in Activity Monitor
The Disk section of Activity Monitor measures how much data each process has read from and written to your storage device. Besides the amount of data, the number of read ins and write outs (IO), essentially how many times the storage system is accessed, are also tracked.
Together the data and IO numbers give you a good read of how well your storage system is performing. When you select the Disk tab, youâll see the following categories for each listed process:
At the bottom of the display are total values for the following categories:
Note: The values displayed in the disk tab are an amalgam of all accesses to any storage device connected to your Mac. Itâs not limited to just the startup device.
You can use the Disk tab to evaluate how well your storage system is working. If youâre experiencing performance issues, you may want to monitor the Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec to see if there is excessive disk utilization. If you can discover what is causing the high utilization, you can make changes to reduce the IO bottleneck.
Some common examples are insufficient RAM causing paging, the swapping of data between RAM and disk, or a disk-intensive app, which may benefit from a faster storage device. Drives with insufficient free space cause your Mac to wait on a disk as space is reallocated.
Network Tab in Activity Monitor
The Network tab displays how much data your Mac is sending and receiving over your network. This tab can be used to identify apps that are heavy users of your network.
The Network tab displays each process and how it affects your network in the following ways: Payroll software programs for mac.
At the bottom of the Network tab are categories for network totals:
Note: Packets are structures for carrying data across a network; they usually contain a header, body (the data), trailer, and checksum (CRC).
If youâre having network performance issues, check to see if one or more apps are hogging the network connection. Also, check the history graph to see if youâre sending or receiving information over the network
Customizing Activity Monitor
Activity Monitor offers a few ways to customize the app; most can be found under the View menu, with three items (Columns, Dock Icon, and Update Frequency) the ones most often manipulated by the user. We covered Dock Icons in Part 1 of this guide, so weâll examine the other two in this part of the guide.
Columns: The Columns menu item allows you to add or remove various categories from the currently selected tab. Some examples for various tabs:
Update Frequency: This menu item allows you to set how often Activity Monitor updates the values for all the processes. You can pick from three update periods: Free burn dvd software for mac pro.
Quitting and Force Quitting Processes
You can quit or force quit an app directly from within the Activity Monitor app. To terminate a process, follow these steps:
To terminate a process, select the process from the Activity Monitor list, then click the X button in the top left corner of the Activity Monitor window.
A sheet will drop down, asking if you really wish to quit âname of selected app.â
You can choose Quit or Force Quit:
Note: Both the Quit and Force Quit options can lead to data loss if the app has not recently performed a save.
Make your selection and click either the Quit or Force Quit button.
Info
Activity Monitor can provide additional information about each process. Select a process from the list, and then click the Info button (a circle with a letter âiâ in the middle) located at the top left of the Activity Monitor window.
A window will open, displaying more detailed information about the selected process. You can view additional details about memory usage, statistics, including the number of calls to the system, threads in use, CPU time, and much more. You can also see which files and ports have been opened by the app.
The Info display can be helpful in troubleshooting process issues, especially the Open Files and Ports. Ever want to know where an appâs plist is located, or which fonts itâs using? You can sometimes find out by examining which files the app has opened. Activity Monitor can be a very helpful utility. If youâre using the app, let us know in the comments below what the app has done for you.
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This article describes some of the commonly used features of Activity Monitor, a kind of task manager that allows you see how apps and other processes are affecting your CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage.
Open Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder of your Applications folder, or use Spotlight to find it. Audio level meter software for mac.
Overview
The processes shown in Activity Monitor can be user apps, system apps used by macOS, or invisible background processes. Use the five category tabs at the top of the Activity Monitor window to see how processes are affecting your Mac in each category.
Add or remove columns in each of these panes by choosing View > Columns from the menu bar. The View menu also allows you to choose which processes are shown in each pane:
CPU
The CPU pane shows how processes are affecting CPU (processor) activity:
Click the top of the â% CPUâ column to sort by the percentage of CPU capability used by each process. This information and the information in the Energy pane can help identify processes that are affecting Mac performance, battery runtime, temperature, and fan activity.
More information is available at the bottom of the CPU pane:
You can also see CPU or GPU usage in a separate window or in the Dock:
Activity Monitor Mac RootMemory
The Memory pane shows information about how memory is being used:
More information is available at the bottom of the Memory pane:
For more information about memory management, refer to the Apple Developer website.
Energy
The Energy pane shows overall energy use and the energy used by each app:
More information is available at the bottom of the Energy pane:
As energy use increases, the length of time that a Mac can operate on battery power decreases. If the battery life of your portable Mac is shorter than usual, you can use the Avg Energy Impact column to find apps that have been using the most energy recently. Quit those apps if you don't need them, or contact the developer of the app if you notice that the app's energy use remains high even when the app doesn't appear to be doing anything.
Disk
The Disk pane shows the amount of data that each process has read from your disk and written to your disk. It also shows 'reads in' and 'writes out' (IO), which is the number of times that your Mac accesses the disk to read and write data.
The information at the bottom of the Disk pane shows total disk activity across all processes. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The graph also includes a pop-up menu to switch between showing IO or data as a unit of measurement. The color blue shows either the number of reads per second or the amount of data read per second. The color red shows either the number of writes out per second or the amount of data written per second.
To show a graph of disk activity in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Disk Activity.
Network
The Network pane shows how much data your Mac is sending or receiving over your network. Use this information to identify which processes are sending or receiving the most data.
The information at the bottom of the Network pane shows total network activity across all apps. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The graph also includes a pop-up menu to switch between showing packets or data as a unit of measurement. The color blue shows either the number of packets received per second or the amount of data received per second. The color red shows either the number of packets sent per second or the amount of data sent per second.
To show a graph of network usage in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Network Usage.
CacheMac Activity Monitor App Nap
In macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later, Activity Monitor shows the Cache pane when Content Caching is enabled in the Sharing pane of System Preferences. The Cache pane shows how much cached content that local networked devices have uploaded, downloaded, or dropped over time.
Use the Maximum Cache Pressure information to learn whether to adjust Content Caching settings to provide more disk space to the cache. Lower cache pressure is better. Learn more about cache activity.
The graph at the bottom shows total caching activity over time. Choose from the pop-up menu above the graph to change the interval: last hour, 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.
Learn moreHow To Read Mac Activity Monitor
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