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On your Macbook, would you like to view app activity and resource management? There is a dedicated apps for that: Activity Monitor. Here’s how to Use Activity Monitor on Mac apps and find all sorts of useful information it can display at any time.
To locate Activity Monitor on a Mac, navigate to Applications > Utilities and double-click Activity Monitor. There you will find a simple app with five tabs and an ever-changing list of entries.
Each of Activity Monitor’s five tabs monitors a different aspect of your Mac’s performance. If your Mac is running the content caching service, you will also see a Cache tab in addition to CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, and Network. I’ll explain what each of these tabs displays and how they may be useful when diagnosing Mac issues.
Steps to Use Activity Monitor on Mac
- Under the Process Name list, select the app or process you want to quit. To make finding the culprit easier, click Process Name in the column header to sort them alphabetically, or use the Search field in the top-right corner of the window to find the app or process. Note that an unresponsive process is labelled with (Not Responding).
- Make sure the app or process is highlighted, then click the Quit (X) button in the top-left corner of the Activity Monitor window.
- Select Quit (this is the same as choosing File -> Quit within an app) or Force Quit, which quits the process immediately.
The CPU Tab
The CPU tab provides an overview of how your Mac’s processor is being utilised by processes. From this list view, you can determine how much CPU a process is consuming, how long it has been active, the user or service running the process, and more.
Below the list are system-wide statistics, such as the percentage of CPU usage by system-level processes and opened applications/processes. The CPU Load graph depicts the total processor load over time, with red representing system processes and blue representing user processes.
The Memory Tab
This is the tab to click if you want to know how your Mac’s RAM is being utilised. When your computer nears its maximum memory capacity, inactive applications in memory are compressed to free up more memory for active applications. Check the Compressed Mem column for each app to determine the amount of memory that app is compressing.
Similar to the other tabs in Activity Monitor, the bottom window contains global statistics. The Memory Pressure graph depicts the efficiency with which your memory serves your processing needs. Memory pressure is determined by free memory, swap rate, wired memory (data that cannot be compressed or swapped to the hard disc), and file cached memory.
The Energy Tab
- Energy Impact: Gives a relative measure of the current energy consumption of each app (lower is better).
- Average Energy Impact: Which apps use the most energy over time.
- App Nap: Tells you if App Nap is active for each app. App Nap is an energy feature that causes inactive background applications to go into a paused state, helping to reduce power usage.
- Requires High Perf GPU: Indicates whether the app is using your Mac’s discrete graphics card (if it has one).
- Preventing Sleep: Shows if an app is preventing your Mac from entering Sleep mode.
FAQ
What can you do with Activity Monitor on a Mac?
When your system is acting slowly or not responding at all, an application or process may be to blame. You can use Activity Monitor to identify the problematic application or process and terminate it.
When should I use Activity Monitor Mac?
When your system is acting sluggishly or not responding at all, a programme or process could be the cause. You can use Activity Monitor to locate and terminate the problematic application or process.