![]() Apple support documentation specifically recommends it for troubleshooting battery life problems, as do countless articles on the web. It is well-known and its “Energy Impact” measure (which was added in Mac OS X 10.9) is often consulted by users to compare the power consumption of different programs. If you are a little tech savvy you might use it to maybe troubleshoot problems.Activity Monitor is a tool in Mac OS X that shows a variety of real-time process measurements. So I don't think Activity Monitor is particularly useful for typical Mac users but it's good to know it's there. It turns out to be part of some app they've installed or part of the system. In almost all cases when people try to investigate these things and they don't know what a process is it turns out to be nothing. Why is this one always there? Why is it running? Why can't I find any information when I search online about it? Things like that. It's that I see a lot of typical Mac users who aren't software engineers discovering Activity Monitor and then looking at these processes and getting obsessed with what each one does. But you may find if your Mac is running slow and you see the name of that app there and it's using most of the CPU then it gives you some sort of clue possibly as to what could be causing your Mac to slow down. However if there's some sort of app you've installed, maybe you installed some sort of cleaner app or antivirus. But if you don't recognize something like a kernel task or a VDC assistant or launchd then chances are that's not going to help you very much. You may run into a situation where your Mac is running sluggishly or something and maybe you can view your active processes here and try and figure out what's running. But again unless you're a software engineer there's really not too much useful information you can get here. So it's a good idea and a good way to get an idea of what you Mac is doing. I can see which ones are using the most energy, reads and rights to the disk, and network access. Go into there and sort by memory and see which task is using the most memory. I could look at other things like Memory. So it's going to add up to 100% so 60% now may still be only using a fraction of my CPU. ![]() Now the high number there doesn't necessarily mean that much because it's a percentage. I'm recording this for the tutorial right now and you can imagine that's using most of the CPU. So I can see what app is using the most CPU time. Let me click on it again to sort the opposite way. I can sort by clicking on one of these columns here. I can look at activity based on CPU, Memory use, Energy use, Disk use, or Network use. So you can see I've got tabs here at the top. That could be a very useful view as well.īut let's leave it at Active processes and try to take a look and see what we can get from this information. Which ones have windows in your screen now. But typically if you go to Window processes you'll see exactly which apps you're using. Here's things that are actually running, actually doing things right now. So you can go further into Active processes. But still a lot of stuff that are just background processes and things you don't need to worry about. ![]() See the user here changed to all Macmost on the right because there are system processes that are being used and there may be other users on your Mac too that are logged out so this narrows it down a bit. In View you can specify instead of say all processes, you can do just My processes. You can do that by going to the View menu. If you're looking to find something here that's useful for the typical user then you want to go and narrow down what you're seeing here. But that's okay because you can ignore most of this. Unless you're a software engineer you're probably not going to know what most of this is. But you basically get this long list of processes and you can see how much CPU they're using and other information about them. You can alter how this view looks so it may not look this way for you if you've changed it. This is what you see typically when you first run it. ![]() How do it use it? To find it look in your Applications Utilities folder or I just use Spotlight and just search for activity, monitor and it comes up that way. A lot of people have asked me exactly what is this for. Video Transcript: Let's take a look at an app that comes with your Mac called Activity Monitor.
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