Activity Monitor User Guide for Macos Catalina

Activity Monitor User Guide for macOS Catalina

View information about Mac processes in Activity Monitor Processes are programs running on your Mac. Processes can be apps, system apps used by macOS, or invisible background processes. Use Activity Monitor to get information about these processes, including how much memory and CPU time the processes are using.

View process activity

In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, do any of the following:

 Get information about a process: Select the process, then double-click it or click the Info button in the Activity Monitor window (or use the Touch Bar).

 Sort processes: Click a column heading to sort the list.

 Reverse the order of items in the column: Click the triangle in the selected column heading.

 See general information about all processes: Click CPU in the Activity Monitor window (or use the Touch Bar). Information about the number of open processes and threads appears at the bottom of the window.

 Search for a process: Enter the name of a process or app in the search field. Group processes for easier viewing

In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, choose one of the following from the View menu:

 All Processes: Shows all the processes running on your Mac.

 All Processes, Hierarchically: Shows processes that belong to other processes, so you can see the parent/child relationship between them.

 My Processes: Shows processes owned by your user account.

 System Processes: Shows processes owned by macOS.

 Other User Processes: Shows processes that aren’t owned by root or the current user.

 Active Processes: Shows running processes that aren’t sleeping.

 Inactive Processes: Shows running processes that are sleeping.

 GPU Processes: Shows running processes owned by the computer’s GPU.

 Windowed Processes: Shows processes that can create a window. These processes are usually apps.

 Selected Processes: Shows only processes you selected in the Activity Monitor window.  Applications in last 12 hours: Show only the apps running processes in the last 12 hours.

 Processes, by GPU: Shows running GPU processes grouped by GPU.

By default, information in the Activity Monitor window is updated every 5 seconds. To change this, see Set how often information is updated.

View CPU activity in Activity Monitor on Mac Most of the time, the processor on your Mac uses only a small percentage of its processing power. When you use apps that require intensive calculation, the processor uses more of its capacity. View CPU activity on your Mac in the Activity Monitor window. To enable viewing in the Dock, select View > Dock Icon and select the Show CPU option you want to view.

In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, do any of the following:

 To view processor activity over time, click CPU (or use the Touch Bar). The following percentages appear in the bottom of the Activity Monitor window:

 System: The percentage of CPU capability that’s being used by processes that belong to macOS.

 User: The percentage of CPU capability that’s being used by apps you opened, or by the processes opened by those apps.

 Idle: The percentage of CPU capability that’s not being used.

 To view current processor activity, choose Window > CPU Usage.

 To view recent processor activity, choose Window > CPU History.

 To display more columns, choose View > Columns, then choose the columns you want to show.

View GPU activity in Activity Monitor on Mac You can see how hard the GPU in your Mac has been working.

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, choose Window > GPU History.

If your Mac feels hot or the battery drains quickly, check the GPU activity. If you see many tall blue bars packed tightly together, consider using an external GPU to handle some of the workload.

See also :

If graphics tasks slow down your Mac If your portable Mac is slower than expected when you perform graphics-intensive tasks, such as playing games or editing video, open Energy Saver preferences. Depending on your Mac, you may see options that let you improve graphics performance in exchange for shorter battery life.

1. On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Energy Saver. 2. Do one of the following:

 If you see Graphics options, select Higher Performance. You need to log out and then log in again for the change to take effect.

 If you see the “Automatic graphics switching” option, deselect it. Your Mac will always use high-performance graphics.

View memory usage in Activity Monitor on Mac You can see the amount of system memory being used on your Mac.

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Memory (or use the Touch Bar) to see the following in the bottom of the window:

 Memory Pressure: Graphically represents how efficiently your memory is serving your processing needs. Memory pressure is determined by the amount of free memory, swap rate, wired memory, and file cached memory.

 Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed.

 Memory Used: The amount of RAM being used. To the right, you can see where the memory is allocated.

 App Memory: The amount of memory being used by apps.

 Wired Memory: Memory required by the system to operate. This memory can’t be cached and must stay in RAM, so it’s not available to other apps.

 Compressed: The amount of memory that has been compressed to make more RAM available. When your computer approaches its maximum memory capacity, inactive apps in memory are compressed, making more memory available to active apps. Look in the Compressed Mem column for each app to see the amount of memory being compressed for that app.

 Cached Files: The size of files cached by the system into unused memory to improve performance. Until this memory is overwritten, it remains cached, so it can help improve performance when you reopen the app.

 Swap Used: The amount of space being used on your startup disk to swap unused files to and from RAM.

 To display more columns, choose View > Columns, then choose the columns you want to show.

Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor The Memory pane displays how much memory your Mac is using, how often it is swapping memory between RAM and your startup disk, and the amount of memory provided for an app and how much of it is compressed memory. When you have free or unused memory, your computer performance does not necessarily improve. macOS obtains the best performance by efficiently using and managing all of your computer’s memory.

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Memory (or use the Touch Bar). The Memory Pressure graph lets you know if your computer is using memory efficiently.

 Green memory pressure: Your computer is using all of its RAM efficiently.

 Yellow memory pressure: Your computer might eventually need more RAM.

 Red memory pressure: Your computer needs more RAM. If memory pressure is yellow, red, or has spikes, check to see if an app is using up memory and causing the memory pressure to increase. If you no longer need to have the app running, you should quit the app. Your computer’s memory pressure is accurately measured by examining the amount of free memory available, the swap rate, and the amount of wired and file cached memory to determine if your computer is using RAM efficiently.

To learn how to add more RAM to your Mac, choose Apple menu > About This Mac, click Memory, then click Memory Upgrade Instructions. (On some Mac models, choose Apple menu > About This Mac, click Support, then click Hardware Support.)

View energy consumption in Activity Monitor on Mac Use the Energy pane of the Activity Monitor window to see the energy use of your Mac. You can monitor overall energy use, and see details about the energy use of each app.

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Energy (or use the Touch Bar). To display more columns, choose View > Columns, then choose the columns you want to show.

The energy use of individual apps and their processes is displayed in the upper part of the Activity Monitor window.

 Energy Impact: A relative measure of the current energy consumption of the app (lower is better).

 App Nap: Whether App Nap is active for this app.

 Requires High Perf GPU: Whether the app requires a high performance graphics card.

 Preventing Sleep: Whether this app is preventing your Mac from going to sleep. The bottom of the window shows information on your overall energy use. If you have a portable Mac, you see additional information related to its battery. All Mac computers

 Energy Impact: Combined energy impact over time.

 Graphics Card (Multiple graphics cards): The type of graphics card being used, if there are multiple graphics cards installed. Higher–performance cards require more energy. Mac portable computers

 Remaining charge: The percentage of battery charge remaining.

 Time until full (plugged in): The amount of time your Mac must be plugged into an AC power outlet until the battery is fully charged.

 Time on AC (plugged in): Time elapsed since your Mac was plugged into an AC power outlet.  Time remaining (unplugged): The estimated amount of battery time remaining.

 Time on battery (unplugged): The amount of time that’s elapsed since your Mac was plugged into an AC outlet.

 Battery (Last 12 hours): The battery charge level over the last 12 hours. See also

View disk activity in Activity Monitor on Mac View the disk activity on your Mac in the Activity Monitor window or in the Dock.

In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, do any of the following:

 To see disk activity, click Disk in the Activity Monitor window (or use the Touch Bar). Activity Monitor tracks the number of times your Mac accesses the disk to read and write data, and shows the amount of data that’s read or written to your disk.

 To see a graph of disk activity in the Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Disk Activity.

 To display more columns, choose View > Columns, then choose the columns you want to show.

View network activity in Activity Monitor on Mac View network activity in the Activity Monitor window or in the Dock. To enable viewing in the Dock, select View > Dock Icon, then select Show Network Usage. View network activity in the Activity Monitor window

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Network (or use the Touch Bar) to see the following in the bottom of the window:

 Packets in, Packets out: The total number of packets received and sent.

 Packets in/sec, Packets out/sec: The speed of information being transferred (in packets per second).

 Data received, Data sent: The total amount of information moved (in megabytes).

 Data received/sec, Data sent/sec: The amount of information moved over time (in bytes per second), also called throughput. This number is also displayed in the graph.

 To display more columns, choose View > Columns, then choose the columns you want to show. View network activity in the Dock

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Network Usage. Select the type of activity displayed

In the Activity Monitor window, you can change the type of data displayed in the network activity graph. The type of data you select is shown in the Activity Monitor window and in the Activity Monitor icon in the Dock.

1. In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Network (or use the Touch Bar). 2. Click the pop-up menu above the graph at the bottom of the window, then choose Packets or Data.

View cache activity in Activity Monitor on Mac View content cache activity in Activity Monitor. 1. In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Cache (or use the Touch Bar). If you don’t see the Cache tab in the Activity Monitor window, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click Sharing, then select Content Caching. After that, quit and then reopen Activity Monitor to view Cache information. 2. To see data served for a particular period of time, click the pop-up menu above the graph, then choose a time period.

The following content caching statistics are displayed: Content cache Description activity

Data Dropped Amount of data the content cache downloaded but could not add to its cache.

Data Served Total amount of data the content cache has served. When these values are nonzero, the content cache is working.

Data Served Amount of data the content cache has served from its cache. The closer these values are to the Data Served From Cache values, the more the content cache is helping.

Data Served Amount of data the content cache downloaded over the internet. From Origin

Data Served Amount of data the content cache downloaded from any of its parent content caches. From Parents

Data Served Amount of data the content cache downloaded from any of its peer content caches. From Peers Content cache Description activity

Data Served To Amount of data the content cache served to any of its child content caches. Children

Data Served To Amount of data the content cache served to client Mac computers, iOS devices, iPadOS devices, and Clients Apple TV devices.

Data Served To Amount of data the content cache served to any of its peer content caches. Peers

Data Uploaded Amount of data uploaded from clients through the content cache.

Maximum Cache How urgently the content cache needs more disk space. Lower cache pressure is better. If these values are Pressure higher than 50%, you should assign the cache more space, move the cache to a larger volume, or add content caches.

Run system diagnostics in Activity Monitor on Mac Activity Monitor can collect information about the status of your Mac in a system diagnostics report. You can save the system diagnostics report and send it to Apple Support.

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click the “System diagnostics

options” pop-up menu (or use the Touch Bar), then choose one of the following:

 Sample Process: Creates a report on a selected process over a period of 3 seconds.

 Spindump: Creates a report for unresponsive apps that were terminated using force quit.

 System Diagnostics: Creates a report based on different logs on your Mac.

 Spotlight Diagnostics: Creates a report based on all the processes running on your Mac

Quit an app or process in Activity Monitor on Mac You can use Activity Monitor to quit a process, even if it’s in a loop or not responding. You can also send a signal to a process to terminate it. If you attempt to quit a process you don’t own, you may be required to authenticate as an administrator.

1. In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, under the Process Name list, select the app or process you want to quit. An unresponsive process is marked with (Not Responding). Note: The Process Name list is not available in the Cache page.

2. Click the Force Quit button in the upper-left corner of the Activity Monitor window (or use the Touch Bar). 3. Choose one of the following options:

 Quit: This is the same as choosing File > Quit within an app. The process quits when it’s safe to do so. If quitting the process could cause data loss or interfere with another app, the process doesn’t quit.

 Force Quit: The process quits immediately. If the process has files open, you may lose data. If the process is used by other apps or processes, those apps or processes could experience problems. To see if a process is used by another process, choose View > All Processes, Hierarchically.

To send a signal to a process, select it in the process list, choose View > Send Signal to Process, choose a signal from the pop-up menu, then click Send.

Change how often information is updated in Activity Monitor on Mac You can change how often the information in Activity Monitor is updated. By default, the information is updated every 5 seconds, but you can update information more frequently for more precise monitoring.

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, choose View > Update Frequency, then choose how often you want to update.

Increasing the update frequency may affect your overall system performance.

To see how much processor time is being used to update Activity Monitor information, watch the CPU Time column in the CPU pane of the Activity Monitor window as you change the update frequency.

 In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Memory (or use the Touch Bar). The Memory Pressure graph lets you know if your computer is using memory efficiently.

 Green memory pressure: Your computer is using all of its RAM efficiently.

 Yellow memory pressure: Your computer might eventually need more RAM.