Sep 22, 2017  Right-click on the Activity Monitor icon in the Dock. In the menu, choose Options and then click Keep in Dock. 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. The Activity Monitor app can be used to troubleshoot your Mac, as well as evaluate how well your Mac is performing overall or with specific running processes (apps). In Using Activity Monitor Part 2, we’ll take a look at using this utility to explore your Mac’s energy use, disk performance, and network performance. Apr 15, 2019  You’ll also learn how CPU, RAM, and disk activity can affect your Mac’s performance over time. How to Open Activity Monitor on Mac. The Activity Monitor app lives in Applications Utilities. Navigate to this folder and double-click the icon to launch the app. However, you can get to this (or any Mac app) much faster using Spotlight search. Activity monitor free download - Temperature Monitor, iTunes Monitor, Net Monitor for Employees Professional, and many more programs.

1. Open Activity Monitor On Mac
2. How To Read Mac Activity Monitor
3. Find Activity Monitor On Mac

Feb 26, 2020  Activity Monitor shows the processes that are running on your Mac, so you can manage them and see how they affect your Mac's activity and performance. 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. Jul 12, 2017  Here’s how to use Activity Monitor to manage your Mac’s memory, fix slow applications, and troubleshoot various other issues. Launch the Activity Monitor app by going to “Applications Utilities Activity Monitor,” or just type “Activity Monitor” into Spotlight. The main screen of Activity Monitor is divided into two sections: 1. By monitoring activity of your MacBook, you can make your device faster. You can do it just with activity monitor mac app. Employers in the business firms use these MAC computers and laptops. To improve the productivity of their business and on another young kids and teens force parents to purchase these tech-machines for them to use it for many reasons such as studies at school, use of.

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

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.

The Activity Monitor app can be used to troubleshoot your Mac, as well as evaluate how well your Mac is performing overall or with specific running processes (apps). In Using Activity Monitor Part 2, we’ll take a look at using this utility to explore your Mac’s energy use, disk performance, and network performance.

In Activity Monitor Part 1, we looked at the basics of using the app, and examined how to use the app to monitor CPU and RAM utilization. If you’re not familiar with how to use Activity Monitor, you may want to take a few moments to check out Using Activity Monitor Part 1: CPU and Memory.

Energy Tab in Activity Monitor

The Energy tab measures the overall energy use of your Mac, as well as on a per process (app) basis. For those of us with MacBooks, the Energy section of Activity Monitor can help us manage the MacBook’s battery runtime by discovering which processes are using excessive amounts of the battery’s energy.

The Energy tab is also useful for those of us with desktop Macs, or who have our MacBooks plugged into the mains (AC). In those cases, the Energy tab can help us discover processes that are using a lot of energy and likely causing our Macs to heat up and run the internal fans, with an annoying high-speed whine.

The Energy tab displays a hierarchical view of processes, with related processes displayed together. An example: If you have multiple Safari pages open (and who doesn’t?), they will show up as a single “Safari” process. But the process can be expanded by clicking on its disclosure triangle to reveal each individual Safari process that is running.

This allows you to dig down through related processes to find the one that’s the energy hog. It also helps keep the tab well organized.

Activity Monitor displays how each group and individual process is affecting your Mac’s energy use using the following categories:

• Energy Impact: Measures the current energy consumption of the app (lower numbers are better).
• Avg Energy Impact: The average impact the app has had on energy consumption over the last 8 hours, or since the Mac was started up, whichever is shorter.
• App Nap: Status of App Nap capabilities of the selected app.
• Preventing Sleep: Shows if the app is preventing your Mac from sleeping.
• Requires High Perf GPU: If your Mac has multiple GPUs, this category displays if the app requires the higher performance GPU, thus requiring more energy use.
• User: The owner of the running process.

At the bottom of the display you’ll see overall totals for energy in the following categories:

• Energy Impact: A graph showing energy use over time.
• Graphics Card: The current graphics card in use.
• Remaining charge: Percent of remaining battery charge.
• Time until full: The amount of time needed to fully charge the battery.
• Time on AC: Time elapsed since the Mac was plugged into an AC outlet.
• Time remaining: Estimate of the amount of time available from the battery.
• Time on battery: The elapsed time that you’ve been powering the Mac from the battery.
• Battery: The battery charge level over the past 12 hours.

Note: The energy categories shown are dependent on the type of Mac you have and the hardware it contains.

About Energy Impact and Avg Energy Impact: Apple has to do some guesswork to determine the amount of energy used on a process-by-process basis. There is no hardware within the Mac that can directly make these types of measurements, but it can be derived from measuring CPU and GPU impact, as well as wakeup impact and App Nap impact. There are also disk and network impacts that have to be included to produce the Energy Impact and Avg Energy Impact numbers.

You should only use the Energy Impact numbers as a guide, and not an exact representation of energy consumed by a process.

Disk Tab in Activity Monitor

The Disk section of Activity Monitor measures how much data each process has read from and written to your storage device. Besides the amount of data, the number of read ins and write outs (IO), essentially how many times the storage system is accessed, are also tracked.

Together the data and IO numbers give you a good read of how well your storage system is performing. When you select the Disk tab, you’ll see the following categories for each listed process:

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• Bytes Written: The total number of bytes written by the process to the storage device.
• Bytes Read: The number of bytes read by the process from the storage device.
• Kind: Displays whether the app is 32-bit or 64-bit.
• PID: A unique number assigned as an ID to each process.
• User: The owner of the process.

At the bottom of the display are total values for the following categories:

• Read in: The total number of times a read from the storage device has occurred.
• Writes out: The number of times data has been written to the storage device.
• Read in/sec: The rate of read operations performed (IO).
• Write out/sec: The rate of write operations performed (IO).
• Data read: The total of data read from the storage device.
• Data written: The total of data written to the storage device.
• Data read/sec: The speed at which data read is occurring.
• Data written/sec: The speed at which data is written to the storage device.
• History Graph: The history graph shows either how much data is transferred over time, or how often (IO) the storage device is accessed. You can select which is shown, Data or IO, by using the popup menu on top of the graph.

Note: The values displayed in the disk tab are an amalgam of all accesses to any storage device connected to your Mac. It’s not limited to just the startup device.

You can use the Disk tab to evaluate how well your storage system is working. If you’re experiencing performance issues, you may want to monitor the Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec to see if there is excessive disk utilization. If you can discover what is causing the high utilization, you can make changes to reduce the IO bottleneck.

Some common examples are insufficient RAM causing paging, the swapping of data between RAM and disk, or a disk-intensive app, which may benefit from a faster storage device. Drives with insufficient free space cause your Mac to wait on a disk as space is reallocated.

Network Tab in Activity Monitor

The Network tab displays how much data your Mac is sending and receiving over your network. This tab can be used to identify apps that are heavy users of your network.

The Network tab displays each process and how it affects your network in the following ways:

• Sent Bytes: Data sent by the process to the network.
• Received Byes: Data received by an app from the network.
• Sent Packets: Packets sent by an app to the network.
• Rcvd Packets: Packets received by an app from the network.
• PID: Unique process identification number.
• User: The owner of the process.

At the bottom of the Network tab are categories for network totals:

• Packets in: Total number of packets received.
• Packets out: Total number of packets sent.
• Packets in/sec: The number of packets received in one second.
• Packets out/sec: Number of packets sent in one second.
• Data received: Total amount of data received from the network.
• Data sent: Total amount of data sent to the network.
• Data received/sec: Amount of data received within one second.
• Data sent/sec: Amount of data sent to the network in one second.
• History Graph: The history graph can show either packets sent and received per second, or data sent and received per second. You can select which is displayed by using the dropdown menu at the top of the graph.

Note: Packets are structures for carrying data across a network; they usually contain a header, body (the data), trailer, and checksum (CRC).

If you’re having network performance issues, check to see if one or more apps are hogging the network connection. Also, check the history graph to see if you’re sending or receiving information over the network

Customizing Activity Monitor

Activity Monitor offers a few ways to customize the app; most can be found under the View menu, with three items (Columns, Dock Icon, and Update Frequency) the ones most often manipulated by the user. We covered Dock Icons in Part 1 of this guide, so we’ll examine the other two in this part of the guide.

Columns: The Columns menu item allows you to add or remove various categories from the currently selected tab. Some examples for various tabs:

• Memory tab: The memory tab can display a number of memory-related categories, which aren’t usually shown. You may find adding Purgeable Memory helpful for seeing if an app that looks to be a memory hog actually has some of the memory marked as purgeable, able to be used by other apps if the need arises.
• Energy tab: The Energy tab can be used to find processes that are causing heat issues with your Mac. To find the types of apps that are causing your Mac’s fan to spin faster, you can add % CPU and & GPU categories to the energy tab to help troubleshoot the issue. The apps having a high-energy impact, and using a large percentage of the CPU or GPU, are likely to be the ones spinning up your Mac’s fans.

Update Frequency: This menu item allows you to set how often Activity Monitor updates the values for all the processes. You can pick from three update periods:

• Very Often: When selected, Activity Monitor will update every second. It can be especially helpful when using any of the Activity Monitor graphs to monitor various events. On the downside, you’ll probably notice Activity Monitor becoming a resource hog on its own.
• Often: This will set the update period to every 2 seconds, and is a good choice when you’re monitoring numerical value updates of a process. It still increases the load on your Mac, but not as much as the Very Often setting.
• Normal: Updates once every 5 seconds. This is the default setting, and is good for general use of the Activity Monitor app.

Quitting and Force Quitting Processes

You can quit or force quit an app directly from within the Activity Monitor app. To terminate a process, follow these steps:

To terminate a process, select the process from the Activity Monitor list, then click the X button in the top left corner of the Activity Monitor window.

A sheet will drop down, asking if you really wish to quit “name of selected app.”

You can choose Quit or Force Quit:

• Quit: Terminates the app in a controlled manner. This form of quitting is similar to selecting the Quit option directly from within the app.
• Force Quit: Terminate the app without regard for open files, ports, or connections to other services. This is similar to using Force Quit when an app is frozen or unresponsive.

Open Activity Monitor On Mac

Note: Both the Quit and Force Quit options can lead to data loss if the app has not recently performed a save.

Make your selection and click either the Quit or Force Quit button.

Info

Activity Monitor can provide additional information about each process. Select a process from the list, and then click the Info button (a circle with a letter “i” in the middle) located at the top left of the Activity Monitor window.

How To Read Mac Activity Monitor

A window will open, displaying more detailed information about the selected process. You can view additional details about memory usage, statistics, including the number of calls to the system, threads in use, CPU time, and much more. You can also see which files and ports have been opened by the app.

Find Activity Monitor On Mac

The Info display can be helpful in troubleshooting process issues, especially the Open Files and Ports. Ever want to know where an app’s plist is located, or which fonts it’s using? You can sometimes find out by examining which files the app has opened. Activity Monitor can be a very helpful utility. If you’re using the app, let us know in the comments below what the app has done for you.

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