

- Where to find activity monitor on mac mac os x#
- Where to find activity monitor on mac pro#
- Where to find activity monitor on mac free#
Where to find activity monitor on mac mac os x#
This number is a cumulative amount of data that Mac OS X has moved between RAM and disk space. This refers to the amount of information moved between RAM and the hard disk. This is the total amount of Virtual Memory for all processes on your Mac. However, if you open Mail before its Inactive memory is used by a different application, Mail will open quicker because its Inactive memory is converted to Active memory, instead of loading Mail from the slower hard disk.
Where to find activity monitor on mac free#
This Inactive memory is available for use by another application, just like Free memory. This information in memory is not actively being used, but was recently used.įor example, if you’ve been using Mail and then quit it, the RAM that Mail was using is marked as Inactive memory.

This information is currently in memory, and has been recently used. The amount of Wired memory depends on the applications you are using. Information in this memory can’t be moved to the hard disk, so it must stay in RAM. If your computer is using a lot of Virtual Memory you might want to consider closing down some apps or even upgrading to more RAM.īelow the processes are some live updating memory stats that could be interesting. If Mac OS X runs out of real memory it uses Virtual memory, or a piece of the slower harddisk instead of your faster RAM chips. If you haven’t guessed it yet “Mem” stand for “Memory” and these tabs show you how much memory is being used by your applications. The next thing you can do is order these processes by ‘Real Mem” and “Virtual mem”.
Where to find activity monitor on mac pro#
I excluded my Time Machine disk from Spotlight and my MacBook Pro became responsive again during back-ups. That is how I found out that Spotlight was trying to index my Time Machine disk with a process called “mds” that claimed 80% of my CPU every time Time Machine started backing up. What I usually do when I see a process using a lot of CPU is Google its name. You might not recognize all the running processes and blindly closing them is never a good idea and can lead to crashes and data loss. Especially since I didn’t even know I had iTunes running and wasn’t using it.Īs soon as you see an application persistently using a large percentage of your CPU you should ask yourself if you really need to have it open and then consider closing it. As you can see in the screenshot here at one point iTunes was using 99% of my computers processing power. This is the first tool in Activity Monitor you can use to spot problems. The processes are ordered by % of CPU usage. These are not just the Applications you’ve launched but also all the background processes needed to run your computer and Mac OS X. The long list of names in Activity Monitor contains all the processes running on your computer. When you first start Activity Monitor it will show you the System Memory tab:
