We never like to have problems with our computers, right? However, some of them are inevitable. Sometimes your apps don’t work, your Mac gets slow, you see a spinning wheel of death, and more. Understanding the root of some problems can be difficult; fortunately, there are some troubleshooting tools to diagnose what’s wrong with your Mac.
One of such tools is the Activity Monitor, and in this article we’ll tell you how to use it, what alternatives are out there, and how to maintain your Mac to avoid different problems. So let’s start!
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Activity Monitor — The Task Manager for Mac
Mac Snow Leopard offers an application called the Activity Monitor, which is designed to show you just how hard your CPU, hard drives, network equipment, and memory modules are working behind the scenes. To run Activity Monitor, open the Utilities folder in your Applications folder. Be sure to click on the gear icon in the lower right of the video and select 1080p resolution if you are viewing from a desktop computer. Here is a demo of the remote surveillance camera view using the Android mobile app. Like the iPhone app the Android all supports live stream views of 1 to 16 cameras on the screen.
If you’re familiar with the Windows Task Manager, then you may wonder whether there is a twin for Mac. Don’t worry, a Task Manager exists on Macs but it has another name — Activity Monitor. Just keep in mind that Activity Monitor is the Mac Task Manager equivalent and functions in a very similar way as it does in Windows.
Activity Monitor shows the processes that are running on your computer, so you can see how they affect your Mac’s performance. This important tool will help you manage your Mac’s activity, so you should know how to use it at its full potential.
How to open Task Manager on Mac
Activity Monitor is located in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder and there are a few ways to launch it. The simplest one is to use Spotlight for a quick search.
Here’s how to access Task Manager on Mac using the Spotlight:
- Press Command+Spacebar to get the Spotlight search field.
- Start typing “Activity monitor.”
- Select the Activity Monitor when it comes up. This will take you to the app.
- . UPDATE regarding CPU usage for Android Oreo and up. So Android Oreo added yet another restriction disallowing access to the CPU usage stats. Thus, CPU usages unfortunately won't work on devices with Android Oreo. I have released a beta version of the app accommodating the rooted Android Oreo devices where it should work just fine. Do post feedback or send me an email if the BETA version.
- Mar 15, 2011 System Monitor is an application for the menu bar of your Mac, designed to inform you unobtrusively about the activity of your computer. You can retrieve up-to-date technical data any time, like process load, CPU temperature, main memory consumption, storage space, disk activity, communication on network interfaces, etc.
However, if Spotlight doesn’t work or you just want to try another way to open Task Manager Mac, do the following:
- Click on the Finder icon in the Dock.
- Choose Applications from the side menu of the window that appears.
- In the Applications folder, select the Utilities folder and open it.
- Double-click on the Activity Monitor icon to launch it.
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Good news, you can avoid the long ways of opening a Task Manager by pinning it to the Dock. Once you do it, you’ll be able to access the Activity Monitor by simply clicking on its icon.
Follow these steps and you won’t keep asking yourself how to start Task Manager on Mac every time you need to check some processes:
- Open the Activity Monitor using one of the ways described above.
- Right-click on the Activity Monitor icon in the Dock.
- In the menu, choose Options and then click Keep in Dock.
That’s it! The Activity Monitor will be available from the Dock of your Mac, so you can view it easily.
How to use the Activity Monitor
The Activity Monitor is a simple but very important tool. Find out what you can do with its help.
Monitor the system parameters
Once you open the Activity Monitor on your Mac, you’ll get access to the five tabs: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, and Network. By analyzing the data, you can identify what processes affect your Mac performance.
- The CPU pane shows how processes are affecting the processor activity.
- The Memory pane shows how the RAM is used by apps on your Mac.
- Tap on the Energy pane and you’ll see the overall energy use and the energy used by each app.
- The Disk pane shows the amount of data that each process has read from your disk and has written to it.
- Use the Network pane to identify which processes send and receive the most data.
View additional info about an app or process
The Mac Task Manager also allows you to check the additional information about every application or process on your Mac. Here’s how to view it:
- Click on the application or process you’re interested in.
- Click on the i button in the top left corner of the Activity Monitor window.
- You’ll see a pop-up window showing additional information about an app or process.
As you see, the Activity Monitor is a real gem. It helps you gain insight into many useful things. Therefore, it will be much easier to diagnose any problem your Mac has.
How to Force Quit applications from a Task Manager in Mac
If some application or program freezes and you can’t quit it normally, you can use the Activity Monitor to shut it down. To force quit an app from a Mac Task Manager, do the following:
- Open the Activity Monitor on your Mac and click on the application you want to force quit.
- Then click on the X button in the top left corner of the Activity Monitor window.
- You will see a pop-up window asking if you want to quit this process.
- Click Quit to close the unresponsive app.
- If the app is still open, choose Force Quit to immediately end the process.
What’s a Control+Alt+Delete equivalent on Mac?
All Windows users know this magic combination: Control+Alt+Delete. The first thing they do when an app or program hangs is using this keyboard shortcut. Fear not: there’s the similar shortcut for Macs.
In addition to the Activity Monitor, Macs have a Force Quit Applications Manager that allows to close the frozen apps and programs. To open it, hold down the Command+Option+Escape keys.
If you just need to force quit an application and don’t care how much CPU or Energy it is using, then you should launch a Force Quit Applications Manager to perform the task. It gives an immediate access to all apps, so you can quickly solve the problem of an unresponsive program.
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What if we tell you that there is a way to avoid all those frozen apps, unresponsive programs, and spinning beach balls? Most likely, you won’t even need to know how to get Task Manager on Mac because everything will work smoothly. Sounds attractive?
The secret is the regular maintenance of your Mac. And a smart utility like CleanMyMac X will help you keep an eye on your computer and take its performance to a new level. You can download it for free here.
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CleanMyMac can not only clean up the system from all the junk, but also free up RAM, delete and reset apps, manage the startup items, remove cache files, and speed up your Mac with its maintenance scripts. That’s what will ensure the good health of your Mac and its top performance.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
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This article describes some of the commonly used features of Activity Monitor, a kind of task manager that allows you see how apps and other processes are affecting your CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage.
Open Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder of your Applications folder, or use Spotlight to find it.
Overview
The processes shown in Activity Monitor can be user apps, system apps used by macOS, or invisible background processes. Use the five category tabs at the top of the Activity Monitor window to see how processes are affecting your Mac in each category.
Add or remove columns in each of these panes by choosing View > Columns from the menu bar. The View menu also allows you to choose which processes are shown in each pane:
- All Processes
- All Processes Hierarchically: Processes that belong to other processes, so you can see the parent/child relationship between them.
- My Processes: Processes owned by your macOS user account.
- System Processes: Processes owned by macOS.
- Other User Processes: Processes that aren’t owned by the root user or current user.
- Active Processes: Running processes that aren’t sleeping.
- Inactive Processes: Running processes that are sleeping.
- Windowed Processes: Processes that can create a window. These are usually apps.
- Selected Processes: Processes that you selected in the Activity Monitor window.
- Applications in the last 8 hours: Apps that were running processes in the last 8 hours.
CPU
The CPU pane shows how processes are affecting CPU (processor) activity:
Click the top of the “% CPU” column to sort by the percentage of CPU capability used by each process. This information and the information in the Energy pane can help identify processes that are affecting Mac performance, battery runtime, temperature, and fan activity.
More information is available at the bottom of the CPU pane:
- System: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by system processes, which are processes that belong to macOS.
- User: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by apps that you opened, or by the processes those apps opened.
- Idle: The percentage of CPU capability not being used.
- CPU Load: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by all System and User processes. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The color blue shows the percentage of total CPU capability currently used by user processes. The color red shows the percentage of total CPU capability currently used by system processes.
- Threads: The total number of threads used by all processes combined.
- Processes: The total number of processes currently running.
You can also see CPU or GPU usage in a separate window or in the Dock:
- To open a window showing current processor activity, choose Window > CPU Usage. To show a graph of this information in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show CPU Usage.
- To open a window showing recent processor activity, choose Window > CPU History. To show a graph of this information in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show CPU History.
- To open a window showing recent graphics processor (GPU) activity, choose Window > GPU History. Energy usage related to such activity is incorporated into the energy-impact measurements in the Energy tab of Activity Monitor.
Memory
The Memory pane shows information about how memory is being used:
More information is available at the bottom of the Memory pane:
- Memory Pressure: The Memory Pressure graph helps illustrate the availability of memory resources. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The current state of memory resources is indicated by the color at the right side of the graph:
- Green: Memory resources are available.
- Yellow: Memory resources are still available but are being tasked by memory-management processes, such as compression.
- Red: Memory resources are depleted, and macOS is using your startup drive for memory. To make more RAM available, you can quit one or more apps or install more RAM. This is the most important indicator that your Mac may need more RAM.
- Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed in your Mac.
- Memory Used: The total amount of memory currently used by all apps and macOS processes.
- App Memory: The total amount of memory currently used by apps and their processes.
- Wired Memory: Memory that can’t be compressed or paged out to your startup drive, so it must stay in RAM. The wired memory used by a process can’t be borrowed by other processes. The amount of wired memory used by an app is determined by the app's programmer.
- Compressed: The amount of memory in RAM that is compressed to make more RAM memory available to other processes. Look in the Compressed Mem column to see the amount of memory compressed for each process.
- Swap Used: The space used on your startup drive by macOS memory management. It's normal to see some activity here. As long as memory pressure is not in the red state, macOS has memory resources available.
- Cached Files: Memory that was recently used by apps and is now available for use by other apps. For example, if you've been using Mail and then quit Mail, the RAM that Mail was using becomes part of the memory used by cached files, which then becomes available to other apps. If you open Mail again before its cached-files memory is used (overwritten) by another app, Mail opens more quickly because that memory is quickly converted back to app memory without having to load its contents from your startup drive.
For more information about memory management, refer to the Apple Developer website.
Energy
The Energy pane shows overall energy use and the energy used by each app:
- Energy Impact: A relative measure of the current energy consumption of the app. Lower numbers are better. A triangle to the left of an app's name means that the app consists of multiple processes. Click the triangle to see details about each process.
- Avg Energy Impact: The average energy impact for the past 8 hours or since the Mac started up, whichever is shorter. Average energy impact is also shown for apps that were running during that time, but have since been quit. The names of those apps are dimmed.
- App Nap: Apps that support App Nap consume very little energy when they are open but not being used. For example, an app might nap when it's hidden behind other windows, or when it's open in a space that you aren't currently viewing.
- Preventing Sleep: Indicates whether the app is preventing your Mac from going to sleep.
More information is available at the bottom of the Energy pane:
- Energy Impact: A relative measure of the total energy used by all apps. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency.
- Graphics Card: The type of graphics card currently used. Higher–performance cards use more energy. Macs that support automatic graphics switching save power by using integrated graphics. They switch to a higher-performance graphics chip only when an app needs it. 'Integrated' means the Mac is currently using integrated graphics. 'High Perf.' means the Mac is currently using high-performance graphics. To identify apps that are using high-performance graphics, look for apps that show 'Yes' in the Requires High Perf GPU column.
- Remaining Charge: The percentage of charge remaining on the battery of a portable Mac.
- Time Until Full: The amount of time your portable Mac must be plugged into an AC power outlet to become fully charged.
- Time on AC: The time elapsed since your portable Mac was plugged into an AC power outlet.
- Time Remaining: The estimated amount of battery time remaining on your portable Mac.
- Time on Battery: The time elapsed since your portable Mac was unplugged from AC power.
- Battery (Last 12 hours): The battery charge level of your portable Mac over the last 12 hours. The color green shows times when the Mac was getting power from a power adapter.
As energy use increases, the length of time that a Mac can operate on battery power decreases. If the battery life of your portable Mac is shorter than usual, you can use the Avg Energy Impact column to find apps that have been using the most energy recently. Quit those apps if you don't need them, or contact the developer of the app if you notice that the app's energy use remains high even when the app doesn't appear to be doing anything.
Disk
The Disk pane shows the amount of data that each process has read from your disk and written to your disk. It also shows 'reads in' and 'writes out' (IO), which is the number of times that your Mac accesses the disk to read and write data.
The information at the bottom of the Disk pane shows total disk activity across all processes. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The graph also includes a pop-up menu to switch between showing IO or data as a unit of measurement. The color blue shows either the number of reads per second or the amount of data read per second. The color red shows either the number of writes out per second or the amount of data written per second.
To show a graph of disk activity in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Disk Activity.
Network
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The Network pane shows how much data your Mac is sending or receiving over your network. Use this information to identify which processes are sending or receiving the most data.
The information at the bottom of the Network pane shows total network activity across all apps. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The graph also includes a pop-up menu to switch between showing packets or data as a unit of measurement. The color blue shows either the number of packets received per second or the amount of data received per second. The color red shows either the number of packets sent per second or the amount of data sent per second.
To show a graph of network usage in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Network Usage.
Cache
In macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later, Activity Monitor shows the Cache pane when Content Caching is enabled in the Sharing pane of System Preferences. The Cache pane shows how much cached content that local networked devices have uploaded, downloaded, or dropped over time.
Use the Maximum Cache Pressure information to learn whether to adjust Content Caching settings to provide more disk space to the cache. Lower cache pressure is better. Learn more about cache activity.
The graph at the bottom shows total caching activity over time. Choose from the pop-up menu above the graph to change the interval: last hour, 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.
Learn more
- Learn about kernel task and why Activity Monitor might show that it's using a large percentage of your CPU.
- For more information about Activity Monitor, open Activity Monitor and choose Help > Activity Monitor. You can also see a short description of many items in the Activity Monitor window by hovering the mouse pointer over the item.