Questions tagged [activity-monitor]
macOS' task manager utility application. It is used to perform different tasks on computer processes, as well as monitor system resource usage.
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iCloud Sync activity log
Trying to figure out how to see activity happening while iCloud Files is syncing. The macOS Console application shows messages from cloudd, but nothing very useful:
The Activity Monitor does not show ...
6
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2answers
387 views
How can I distinguish a service form a process in Activity Monitor?
Is there a way to determine if an entry listed in Activity Monitor is a service (daemon) or a process (application)?
Examples:
Firefox (application)
com.apple.audio.SandboxHelper (daemon?)
Is there ...
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0answers
14 views
How do I relate Activity Monitor's Disk “Data read/sec” and “Data written/sec” to overall data transfer rate?
I'm trying to understand just how much speed I'm getting when writing big files out one of my MacBook Pro's USB 3.0 sockets to an external drive, also with USB 3.0. An example is the copying -- via a ...
5
votes
1answer
134 views
What is this mystery process: “-i”?
I have a mystery process visible in Activity Monitor, simply called "-i" - don't remember ever seeing this before. Its parent process is launchd, and belongs to root.
Persists between reboots;
...
4
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1answer
975 views
com.apple.hiservices-xpcservice results in frequent hangs and freezes in my mac
Problem:
com.apple.hiservices-xpcservice hangs repeatedly ever since I upgraded to macOS Mojave 10.14.1. Now,everytime the process hangs it is indicated by red colored fonts in the Activity Monitor. ...
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1answer
34 views
What do Memory and Compressed Memory columns mean exactly in Activity Monitor
I'm aware what compressed memory is from answers like this and Apple support but what I can't find is what exactly the usage means.
Take my system right now:
Is it telling me the top process is ...
2
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0answers
438 views
Wi-Fi taking up lot of memory
Since the last major upgrade to macOS Mojave, I have the Wi-Fi process taking up a lot of memory and in an exponentially way. Time to time I need to force quit it in Activity Monitor because it takes ...
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1answer
40 views
What is the process „Tornit“? It wants to access Safari documents & passwords
I was using Safari a couple of days ago, when I got a pop-up window:
Tornit wants to control Safari and access your documents and passwords.
Do you allow it?
I clicked No.
Tornit is a process I ...
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1answer
26 views
Activity monitor stops updating or intermittently updates
Since I upgraded to High Sierra, the Activity Monitor has been relatively unusable for me. When I launch it, it updates for a while, but after a while (especially after a time of high CPU load), it ...
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1answer
50 views
How can a process have 970% CPU usage on a dual-core computer?
My MacBook has a dual-core processor with hyperthreading, so 4 software cores. Seems like the maximum CPU usage would be 400%? I missed the screenshot, but today kernel_task shot up to 970% CPU for a ...
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0answers
337 views
Macbook performance issues with browsers
I have a MacBook Pro from 2013, and I'm having issues in both Chrome and Firefox - both are slowing down to a crawl, and when I check Activity Monitor I have multiple processes (in all the 'tabs' at ...
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209 views
Macbook air when watching youtube at 1080p60f fan goes full speed google chrome using 180% of cpu
I have a Macbook air 13inch mid 2011 running macOS High sierra.
when I am watching youtube at 1080p 60 fps my Macbook air fan runs at nearly full speed.
As you can google chrome is sucking 120% of my ...
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1answer
157 views
Why is Adobe Acrobat using only one core for a heavy task, and how can I make it perform faster?
Adobe Acrobat is performing Optical Character Recognition on a document with thousands of pages. This is a heavy task which will take hours.
Activity Monitor tells me that Acrobat is only using one ...
2
votes
1answer
25 views
Tracing real-time filesystem calls by process?
I suspect my backupd is performing a full filesystem scan. I can't tell because I don't know how to use Activity Monitor (or something else) to see what directories and files backupd is reading or ...
2
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1answer
211 views
How process hierarchy works in macOS
I'm wondering how Activity Monitor relates these two process if the child (Safari Web Content) doesn't have the ppid of the main one (Safari). pstree, which uses the ppid to organize the tree, shows ...
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0answers
38 views
What could cause a huge spike in Unix System Calls for a process and how to debug
Computer Stats
Mac mini (Late 2014)
2.8 GHz i5
8 GB RAM
10.13.5 High Sierra (upgraded from Sierra this week while debugging this issue)
Background
I recently noticed that a certain tab in Chrome ...
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0answers
18 views
Is it possible to disable ending specific processes in Activity Monitor?
I use FocusMe for productivity reasons and such. The software works quite well, especially since my roommate agreed to create and safeguard a password. But, in order to prevent the program from ...
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1answer
50 views
How can I display Activity Monitor's “Memory” columns through Terminal?
Activity Monitor has a number of columns that show different measurements of memory usage for each process. Including:
Memory
Real Memory (various)
Compressed Memory
How can I display these for a ...
8
votes
2answers
299 views
Why is Illustrator throttled to 2% speed when it's in the background?
I regularly run a .jsx script in Adobe Illustrator that saves a bunch of files in a particular format.
while Illustrator is the active app, running the script on 5 files takes 23 seconds.
When ...
0
votes
3answers
393 views
Activity Monitor dock icon CPU history aggregate
On my old Mac I have a CPU history icon showing single aggregate graph.
On the new Mac running the same OS version and having the same number of cores I can't seem to find this option. History only ...
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1answer
19 views
What is portProxy.bin and why is it sucking/eating/using up my CPU?
Through today, portProxy.bin has been eating up my CPU, constantly using about 60% and making the fans in my computer whizz up.
I'm guessing it might be connected to my VPN use, but now I haven't ...
3
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1answer
205 views
Why is “Real Memory” greater than “Memory” for kernel_task process?
What exactly does Activity Monitor's Memory column mean?
How come in the example situation below (from a macOS High Sierra system) the Real Mem column is greater than the Memory column?
According ...
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1answer
163 views
the `Flash Player` occupy CPU is very high after I open a Flash page
In Safari I open a page that contains Flash, after I close the page. in the Activity Monitor, the Flash Player occupy CPU is very high, and whats the meaning of the red color?
My model is Macbook Pro ...
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0answers
29 views
Safari shows blue dot below Dock icon though it's not in process table [duplicate]
Summary:
Safari is running according to the Dock (icon has dot below it, and right-click shows "Force Quit"); however Activity Monitor doesn't show it and ps -ef | grep -i saf returns nothing. ...
3
votes
2answers
198 views
Why aren't my cores more busy?
just purchased a 2010 Mac Pro, running High Sierra. It has 12 lovely cores.
But, when I look at the CPU activity in the CPU History half of the rows are blank (image below).
Does this suggest one ...
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1answer
147 views
What is this no-name item in Activity Monitor's Energy tab?
I'm running macOS High Sierra and just noticed a couple of these processes with an icon but no name. See screenshot below.
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0answers
14 views
How do I find out what a kernal_task is doing? [duplicate]
I have a kernal_task that is routinely consuming over 400% CPU, leaving me 0% - 8% of my computer's power for doing things like typing.
How do I find out what it's doing? And how do I kill it / ...
2
votes
1answer
628 views
Processes in Activity Monitor with gray lettering
Why are there some processes listed in Activity Monitor for applications that I've recently quit? They are displayed in light grey characters under the Energy tab, and the only column with data is the ...
4
votes
1answer
2k views
Random extreme CPU spikes on random browser tasks
I've noticed that every once in a few days (sometimes daily) my CPU spikes to a 120% or such usage when any of my browsers are open.
The scenario is weird, today I was watching a movie using VLC ...
2
votes
1answer
439 views
What's the normal value for cached files?
My computers been randomly shutting down. I've noticed on activity monitor that cached files is almost always at 8GB+, even with no programs running.
Is this a normal value? If not, how do I diagnose ...
4
votes
1answer
3k views
What is mediaremoteagent under Activity Monitor?
Under activity monitor there's a process called mediaremoteagent. I can't find any information about this process. What is this process and is it safe to disable it?
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1answer
25 views
What could cause swapping when there is no memory spike?
I had a performance issue recently, which I was able to capture in the Monitor. It looks like there was plenty of free memory, but then suddenly the graph goes red, with no real spiking.
Could this ...
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1answer
213 views
Keyboard shortcut to switch between Activity Monitor tabs?
Are there keyboard shortcuts to switch between or select specific Activity Monitor View, e.g. CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk & Network?
Use case example, instead of clicking with the mouse, it'd be ...
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0answers
239 views
What is the “rm” process in Activity Monitor
The rm terminal command is being invoked (by an app, not through terminal), and the process has been running for a while at 100%.
Here it is in Activity Monitor:
Why is it seemingly stuck working so ...
3
votes
0answers
564 views
Why is Activity Monitor showing two different memory values for the same process?
In Activity Monitor, I am getting two different values for the same process, mds_stores.
The usage was around 4 GB an hour ago in the list and the window. It was high because I was reindexing my ...
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1answer
167 views
Is it normal for LaunchD to write over 600 megs of data to /private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64?
My hard drive began writing a lot and I was having to wait a lot to launch apps.
The Activity Monitor told me that launchd had written over 600 megs to the drive.
So I ran this:
sudo lsof -p $(ps -...
4
votes
1answer
453 views
Activity Monitor show no processes
With 10.13. I using Item2 to compile golang (src/all.bash). When cpu is get 100% The Item2 can't response. I have already open Activity Monitor. But I can't force quit the Item2. Then I quit ...
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0answers
191 views
Activity Monitor doesn't show main info?
this happens only some times .
what changes is the info displayed in the lower portion of the window ,
what could be the issue?
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1answer
27 views
Fan running almost constantly
Quite recently, my late 2012 Mac Mini went from being virtually silent, to having the fan on quite hard nearly all the time, regardless what I'm doing. If I use some 3D rendering or similar then it ...
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0answers
837 views
Function of a particular process in macOS High Sierra! (PrintUITool)
What is the significance of this (PrintUITool) process which goes by the name of PrintUITool, I cam across this process in activity monitor and found it take up huge chunks of memory and CPU space of ...
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vote
1answer
65 views
What is the difference between `IO` and `Data` in the Activity Monitor?
In the Activity monitor, under the tab Disk,
at the bottom center, there is a small graph which can be set to either IO or DATA
The two graphs look somewhat similar. I understand that I/O very ...
2
votes
1answer
2k views
Safe way to cancel shrinking hard drive partition
I thought it would be a good idea to create another partition on my hard drive to use as a backup. I opened disk utility and configured the internal hard drive to split half between the OS partition ...
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vote
1answer
349 views
How to get details of running applications on Terminal?
I have found that using activity monitor I get all the information I need. I now just need a way to access this information via preferably Python or even Bash and Apple Script. I just need to get the ...
3
votes
1answer
3k views
How to resume a “paused” application after an out of memory situation?
Occasionally - even with abundant care - my 16GB MBPro runs out of application memory and the dreaded "No more application memory available" dialog appears.
Fortunately we are still able to access ...
3
votes
1answer
181 views
how to stretch a single wallpaper image across multiple monitors
I would like to stretch the same image across multiple monitors.. how do i do that?
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1answer
416 views
How is the “Memory” column calculated in Activity Monitor?
How is the per-process "Memory" column calculated in Activity Monitor? The name is quite vague and I haven't found anyone say anything about it aside from stuff like, e.g., "Memory used in RAM." I can'...
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1answer
44 views
How can I determine where network data is going?
Activity Monitor always reports several kB or MB being transferred. I do not know where it's going or coming from. How can I find out?
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0answers
6k views
macOS Sierra kernel_task high CPU and memory usage for main user
I tried everything that comes up in the Apple forums, such as booting in the Safe Mode, Disk Utility's First Aid, closing all the apps and paying close attention to Console app and System Monitor to ...
2
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1answer
96 views
What are the green columns/lines mean in Activity Monitor - Energy - Battery?
What do these green columns in activity monitor - energy - battery mean? I've included a screen shot of activity monitor - energy if that helps.
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1answer
493 views
How can I diagnose a Mac running hot and having high fan usage?
My Mac is running hot with the fan cutting in often. How can I diagnose what's wrong?
PS: Some sources mentioned Activity Monitor as a tool to diagnose this, but I couldn't find the application.
