Looking for a way to view app activity and resource management on your Mac? There is a special application for this: Activity Monitor. Here’s how to control your apps with the Activity Monitor, and how to find all kinds of useful information it can show you anytime.
How to open activity monitor on Mac?
Activity Monitor can be quickly accessed and even pinned to your Dock for frequent access. Here’s how to find it.
Step 1: Open your Applications case. You should be able to find it in the Platform. Otherwise, you can search for it in your Searcher menu.
2nd step: Select the Utilities folder in Applications.
Step 3: Find it Activity monitor app and select it. Its icon looks like a heart rate monitor, and since the apps are listed alphabetically, they should be at the top.
What can the activity monitor do?
You can use Activity Monitor to view all active apps and see how much of your Mac’s resource is each app, as well as how all of the software on your Mac is affecting performance. This allows you to make decisions about which apps to remove or change – and it also lets you troubleshoot problematic apps or get rid of unresponsive ones. Let’s go over the main functions available on Activity Monitor and how you can use them.
Find apps that hog your Mac’s resources
Look at the top of the Activity Monitor window and you will see several tabs with more detailed information about the resources used by current applications. You can use this information to find out which unnecessary applications are hogging a lot of storage, memory, or processing power, and remove them to speed up your computer or troubleshoot issues that have occurred.
Step 1: The first tab is the CPU section, where you can specifically see the processing power – CPU time, threads, GPU time, etc. – that each application uses. Processing power is usually not much of a concern, unless you have a whole bunch of high-demand programs running at the same time, but it can be useful to see what your Mac is running or what is working with it. He fights. If you’re having visual errors, you might also want to see if the GPU is having trouble with background apps.
At the bottom of this window, you can also know the overall CPU load currently. This summary can be useful in diagnosing problems.
If an application is causing a particular problem, you can double-click and then choose the To leave option to stop it (this also applies to all sections).
2nd step: The second tab shows how much Memory your current applications take. When your RAM is pushed to the maximum, apps may crash or crash frequently. This tab is a great place to search for software that is too RAM hungry and focus only on the apps you currently need.
Step 3: Go to the fourth tab and you will see Disk activity, or what data is written to and read from your storage. This can help you spot problems with applications that use too much or too often disk space, and could slow down other software.
Save energy and control energy settings
Step 1: Head to the Energy tab, and you can see how much power each app is consuming. Sections include Energy impact, the amount of power that an app has used in the last 12 hours, if the app is set to take a nap after a certain time, or if the app is prevented from sleeping. These are all useful information for MacBook users who have had battery issues.
2nd step: If your battery is about to die and you want to save as much battery life as possible, you can use the Energy impact section to quickly find and close unnecessary applications using too much power. As before, double-clicking on an app will display more information and allow you to To leave the application.
Step 3: For long-term battery management, look for apps that don’t absolutely need to run in the background and make sure they’re on for nap if possible. Any apps that are not essential for your work or that require constant online updates should not be kept from sleeping (browsers, for example, are usually not set up for napping).
Manage bandwidth
The last section of the activity monitor is Network, which monitors the number of packets that individual programs send and receive from the Internet. If you are having issues with online disconnections, slowdowns, or downloads that are taking too long, this is the section you should focus on. Look for apps with an unusual amount of online activity that you don’t need to use right now, and close them to help improve your speeds.
Do Macs have a task manager?
Windows Task Manager is the somewhat infamous native application on the Windows operating system that allows users to manage all active software on the computer. Although it’s commonly referred to as a way to shut down unresponsive or broken applications for the purpose of fixing problems, Task Manager can monitor application resources, change how Windows starts up, and variety of other purposes – which makes many Mac users wonder if there is anything similar on MacOS.
Activity monitor is it. The tips and tricks above will walk you through the best ways to use it.
If you’re having an unexpected Mac problem and you’re not sure what’s causing it, it’s usually a good idea to jump into Activity Monitor and see if you can spot anything unusual to help narrow down the issue. And while less common, it’s also a way to spot predatory apps that you might not know are running.
