Understanding The Activity Monitor Can Help You Improve Mac's Performance
Does the spinning beach ball come to haunt you very often? It is time to do some clean up activity on your mac to regain mac’s old performance. Activity Monitor located in Utilities folder under Applications is an important tool that comes with mac, which can help you understand why your mac is slowing down. This tool can provide insight on how much CPU and memory each of the apps are using.
The main screen of the Activity Monitor lists the processes along with the % of your Mac's CPU usage, real and virtual memory usage. The % CPU tells how much percentage of CPU resources each process is taking up on your mac. You can check the CPU usage for a known app such as iTune to understand how it works. Normally, the usage for most processes should be within 10-20%, unless an intensive application is running. If you find normal apps such as iTunes, Safari and others hogging a lot of CPU resources then, you can quit those applications. Any process that is taking up 30-50% of your resources is sure to slow down your mac.
You can use the Quit process button at the top left of the screen to kill processes that are eating up your system resources. At the bottom of your Activity Monitor, you can find a graph that shows the CPU usage. You can also find a pie chart of your system memory. Disk activity will give you information on how much space is used up on your hard disk. All these information are vital to understanding what applications are really pulling the performance down.
On analysis, you may find that some applications are inefficient and gobbling the system resources. It is a good idea to uninstall these apps and find possible alternatives to them. If you really need the apps then, make sure you double check if the apps have stopped running in the background after you quit the app. You may also find low disk space to be one of the reasons for slow performance. You can use software utilities like OnyX to periodically monitor the usage of your disk space. Tools like Clean My Mac in-built algorithms to clear unnecessary cache and temporary files from mac. Tools make it easy to find giant files that are hiding in your system. You can also search files that meet your criteria. It is easy to schedule these tools to automatically clean up files, which saves a lot of time. Understanding the information provided by Activity Monitor and embracing cleaning tools will help you experience a mac that it was designed for.
The main screen of the Activity Monitor lists the processes along with the % of your Mac's CPU usage, real and virtual memory usage. The % CPU tells how much percentage of CPU resources each process is taking up on your mac. You can check the CPU usage for a known app such as iTune to understand how it works. Normally, the usage for most processes should be within 10-20%, unless an intensive application is running. If you find normal apps such as iTunes, Safari and others hogging a lot of CPU resources then, you can quit those applications. Any process that is taking up 30-50% of your resources is sure to slow down your mac.
You can use the Quit process button at the top left of the screen to kill processes that are eating up your system resources. At the bottom of your Activity Monitor, you can find a graph that shows the CPU usage. You can also find a pie chart of your system memory. Disk activity will give you information on how much space is used up on your hard disk. All these information are vital to understanding what applications are really pulling the performance down.
On analysis, you may find that some applications are inefficient and gobbling the system resources. It is a good idea to uninstall these apps and find possible alternatives to them. If you really need the apps then, make sure you double check if the apps have stopped running in the background after you quit the app. You may also find low disk space to be one of the reasons for slow performance. You can use software utilities like OnyX to periodically monitor the usage of your disk space. Tools like Clean My Mac in-built algorithms to clear unnecessary cache and temporary files from mac. Tools make it easy to find giant files that are hiding in your system. You can also search files that meet your criteria. It is easy to schedule these tools to automatically clean up files, which saves a lot of time. Understanding the information provided by Activity Monitor and embracing cleaning tools will help you experience a mac that it was designed for.