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Hands-On Apple 232: Activity Monitor
00:32:23
Troubleshooting Your Mac From Within!
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We've all been there, especially in the pre Apple Silicon days. Your Mac fan is spinning like it's trying to take off your battery. Well, it's not keeping up and an app is unresponsive or perhaps just everything feels slow and you have no idea what's actually going on. Most people in that situation either restart, hope it goes away or just download some third party speed up your Mac app of dubious quality. But sitting in your Utilities folder is a free Apple built tool that can tell you exactly what's happening on your Mac in real time. It's called Activity Monitor and once you know how to read it, it's the first place you'll look anytime something feels off. Stay tuned for this episode of Hands on Apple. This episode is brought to you by Outsystems, a leading agentix systems platform built for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are building, orchestrating and governing Agentix systems on the Outsystems platform and with good reason. Architect deliver and scale govern agentic systems with agility and trust using one open and unified platform Power secure company wide agentic orchestration for core business operations. Teams of any size and technical depth can use Outsystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. With Outsystems you can rapidly launch ideas from concepts to completion. It's the leading agentix systems platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to accelerate growth, reduce operational friction and deliver real enterprise impact with AI out systems. Build your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com TWIT that's outsystems.com TWIT podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands on Apple. I am Micah Sargent and today it's time to take a look at one of my favorite applications. I've been saying that a lot lately, but that's because these apps are some of my favorite apps on the Mac. And this next one is Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor is a wonderful little app, a utility that can help you figure out what the heck is going on on your Mac So let's kind of dig in by heading over to macOS and taking a look. So here we are on macOS. And before we show you the app, I want to talk about what exactly the purpose of this app is. Activity monitor. It's macOS's built in system monitor. So it shows you every single process running on your Mac. It organizes it into five tabs based on what you're doing. So let's open it up to take a look. Well, the quickest way to get to it is by holding down the command key and hitting space to open up Spotlight. And then you type in Activity, Activity perhaps and you can hit Enter. But you can also access it by going into Finder, heading into Applications, choosing Utilities. It's a folder within the Applications section and within there you will find Activity Monitor. Now you can see why I've chosen to use Spotlight to, to access it. So inside of Activity Monitor you've got five tabs, you've got cpu, you've got memory, you've got energy, you've got disk, and you've got network. Each of these will tell you about again, the processes that are running on your Mac and tell you about how they're affecting these different things, how they're affecting the cpu, the memory, the energy of your machine, disk, write and read, and also if they have network connection, how it's affecting that as well. And every running app, every background helper, every system process, every plugin, they all show up here. And honestly, looking at this, it can be a little overwhelming at first as you're scrolling through, but once you kind of know what to focus on at that point it becomes useful. You can spot things very quickly and know what is going on. Now here's something that you need to understand. If you're going to use Activity Monitor regularly, then it's not a bad idea to lock it into your dock. And there will be another reason to do this later. So what I like to do is if I am going to keep Activity Monitor around, I will right click on it in my dock and I will choose Options and choose Keep in Dock. That means that even if I quit it, Command Q to quit Activity Monitor, you'll notice that it stays there in my dock. We're going to get to why it's useful to have it in your dock. When we talk about some of the hidden tricks that, well, somewhat hidden tricks that this is capable of. Now let's start with the first tab, the CPU tab. This shows what on your Mac is working hard. And in fact this is where most people start because the CPU tab kind of shows you what's making use of the processor in your Mac and it can give you an idea of why things might be slowing down. When you look at this, you're going to see some different things here. First, the name of the process. The percent CPU is actually telling you what percentage of the central processing unit is being used by that process. So how much is being used by these individual processes. And so what's great is you can use the SORT functionality to see what's making up most of the cpu and in this case looks like NDI Scan converter, which is the tool that I'm using to actually display my Mac on on the program that I use for you here that's making the most use. So on a multi core Mac that's of course every Mac that's been sold in years, values above 100% are actually normal because each core of your multi core Mac can contribute up to 100%. So what does that mean? It means that an eight core Mac can actually show 800% if something is fully maxing out your machine. The bottom of the window goes ahead, breaks it down system wide so you can see how much CPU is being used by the system itself. So that's macOS. How much is being used by the user processes, These are the apps that you've launched or the plugins that you've launched and how much is idle. In other words, not currently being used. Of course. Clicking to sort by CPU it's the quickest way to find an app that is taken up a whole heck of a lot of your cpu. You can sort highest to lowest and of course sort lowest to highest. Now one thing that you'll note is that sometimes you are able to get more information here. If a program is not running properly, if for some reason it's frozen, you'll actually see it in red here and that can give you some insight into what's going on. Now what are we looking for when we're looking at the CPU information? Well, look for one process that's consistently seeming to be using 80% plus when you're not actively doing anything. If there's not currently an activity running and activity monitor is showing 80% CPU, then there might be some sort of issue with that particular plugin or app and it can be helpful to force quit that app in order to essentially tell it, hey, let's try this again. Let's start fresh. Let's see if there was something going on that could be at issue Here. So when I look at my Mac, not this one that we're showing here, I can see that there are several programs that are running at 80 to 90% of the CPU. And the good news is all of those apps, it makes sense for them to be using as much as they are. So I don't have any runaway apps at the moment. Chrome is a great thing to check in this section because you may find that it's eating up a lot of your cpu. Also, another thing to look for here is that if there's a process that you don't recognize and it's also hogging cpu, it might be worth searching online to identify. It might also be a misbehaving portion of an app that you have installed. And so you can essentially force quit that part. The app will relaunch that helper, and then it can take care of memory issues as well. Now, I don't recommend that people go here and start sort of freaking out about the different processes running on their Mac because there are a lot of strange names for different processes that are running, and they may seem like, oh goodness, what is that? What is that? That's where it's helpful to look it up. Type in Activity Monitor, followed by the name of the process, and it will likely tell you what in the world is going on. Now, there's something really interesting, which is that we are currently in the midst of a transition with macOS. And so there's another column that's actually very important right now, and that column is the Kind column. Now, in order to add a column to Activity Monitor, because kind may not show up for you immediately, you can right click and you'll see a list of the options of things that Activity Monitor can show. It can show Sandbox, it can show sudden termination. It can show all sorts of stuff, including features that are actually part of other tabs. So in this case, you may want to keep the sort of processes and CPU stuff here. Perhaps you'll also add GPU stuff here and everything else kind of falls to the wayside. But if you don't have Kind, we want to get Kind in there. And here is why it matters, because Kind will show you whether each process is running as Apple Silicon Native or if it's running via Rosetta. Rosetta is, of course, the method by which Apple has allowed intel apps. That's when Apple used to use intel chips in their Macs to be able to run on modern Apple silicon in 2026. This year, Apple announced that in MacBooks 26.4 Rosetta support is being phased out after the current version of macOS. So after Tahoe, no more Rosetta support. So if there's an app that has a kind other than Apple in this section, it may be that you need to find a replacement if you don't currently have one. Now I've sorted by kind here and I can see that all of these are Apple, which is not a surprise because this specific machine does not have a lot of third party apps installed. But if I go to my Mac, I can see that there are two, two apps that are currently running via Rosetta. One is called Timestamp and the other is called KM Link. Now KM Link is a tool that allows my Keyboard Maestro application to be connected to my Steam Deck, no Stream deck, and lets me access those Keyboard Maestro shortcuts. So that is going to go the way of the dodo very soon and I need to be aware of and look for possible replacements. If you check the Kind column and everything says Apple, you're good to go. You don't have anything you need to worry about, but if you find an intel app, you may want to reach out to the developer and keep track of that information. All right, so that is a quick way to know about what's going on when it comes to Rosetta support and whether you might need to find something. It's baseball, but so much more. Go bananas for Banana Ball with ESPN on Disney. The greatest show in sports. Are you kidding me? Is the phenomenon everyone's talking about. The trick? Play to the plate, catch the Savannah Bananas and other fan favorite teams all season long with select games streaming with ESPN on Disney. Let's go. US residents 18 only select banana ball games available to all Disney subscribers. Terms apply.
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Moving right along, it is time to talk about the next tab after cpu. CPU is often the one that you can look at first to make sure that if something is causing your machine to slow down, this is probably where it is. But memory is another way to check if there's a reason that things are sluggish. Okay, so when you look at the memory tab, you're seeing a list of every process, just like the CPU tab, and how much memory each is using. At the bottom you see what's called the memory pressure graph. And this also includes stats for physical memory. So in this MacBook Air have 16 gigabytes of physical memory. Currently 13.5, 13.6 gigs of that full 16 are being used. And it shows that. It shows a breakdown of how that's split up by apps and system processes. So 4.83 ish of the current memory is being used by apps, whereas only 2.57 is being used by wired memory. And it also has information on your cached files and how much of this data is being used. Now, you'll notice that under memory pressure, the graph changes from red, yellow and green based on less or more pressure. And in this case, we can see that green is. It just means it's sort of a representation of the health of the system by saying that it's not taking up as much and so it is able to run and run pretty quickly. Green means memory is healthy. Yellow means you're starting to feel some pressure. So macOS is actually compressing memory to make room. Red means that you're probably actively swapping data to disk and that is going to slow things down. If you are consistently seeing yellow or red, that's the clearest indicator that, well, you need more ram. So that's where you kind of figure out if you are running things on your Mac and you were going, why am I constantly running up against issues? If you're regularly seeing yellow and red and memory, chances are you may have gone with the wrong setup there. There may have been a better choice as far as RAM goes. And on your next purchase you'll know. Okay, 16 gigs, not enough for this machine and what I actually do. So let's talk about what else you might do with this other than asking yourself, do I really need to upgrade? Because if it's all green, the whole time that you're doing your workflow, you're good. If it goes yellow a little bit, you're probably still good. If it's regularly red, well, that's where it might be worth a change. So what do you actually do with this? Well, you can sort by memory column, so we can use that section to see what apps are taking up the most memory. This will help you find your biggest memory consumers. Now, browsers, Chrome especially, will take up a lot of memory. And then you'll also find creative apps near the top in the processes as well. If you spot something using way more memory than makes sense, this is also a sign of a memory leak in that app. So quitting and restarting it will usually fix things. But it does mean that that developer probably needs to update and correct something in its in the code of the app or the process to fix that memory leak. What about what's left? Energy, Disk and network. Well, energy is, as you might imagine, going to show you how much energy each app is using. So the key column here is Energy impact. This first section, this will show you that's a relative number by the way. It will show you a sense of which apps are working your battery the hardest. So for MacBook users, this is going to be the tab to check when your battery is draining faster than you would have expected before you can spot those high impact apps and decide, okay, I don't need this right now like NDI Scan converter which is using up a bunch of memory or excuse me, a bunch of energy on this Mac. And you know what's funny? I have this MacBook Air that I use regularly but for for recording hands on Mac, right? And I've got to practice what I preach because I have regularly found this MacBook Air to be dead when I don't have it plugged in. And so I've been keeping it plugged in and now I'm realizing that NDI Scan converter running the whole time has been using up so much of the power of this machine and is therefore what is responsible for this Mac D so quickly. So again, it's worth checking this stuff regularly to see what in the world is going on. Now that said, I want to point out that it's not just the battery apps that you or the battery powered Macs that you want to check energy on, because on your machine that's plugged in, you still want to know what the energy impact is of specific apps just so you can get an idea of what might be spinning up the fans, what might be generating heat, and what might be taking up the some of the power that you'd be using for your machine. Next is disk. Now disk is of course showing you what's reading from and writing to your storage. So you'll notice that there's a bytes written and a bytes read section that is telling you how much data is being written to the disk, how much data is being read from the disk. And, and this is useful when your Mac seems to be kind of busy, but you don't really know why. If something seems to be hammering your disk in the background, even if it doesn't seem to be pulling on the cpu, it could be that something's writing a whole heck of a lot of data to disk at once. And so that is a good Way to get an idea of what's going on. It's also useful for die for diagnosing why a backup or a sync feels slow. You can see if another process might be competing for disk access in order to do that backup. So all good information in writing and reading to the disk. Lastly, network. As you might imagine, this is an indicator of what is sending and receiving data. It does it in bytes sent and bytes received and then also has sent and received packets as well. So this shows that 12.8 gigabytes of data have been sent by NDI Scan converter. Obviously makes sense. It's sending to to this program in order to show the screen and it has received very little. Let's see some of the apps that have received the most. Well, it turns out that the biggest are different processes that are just part of macOS, but NDI Scan converter still comes out as the highest among these. It's helpful when you on a slow or metered connection and you want to know what's eating bandwidth. So if you keep getting that notification from your ISP saying hey, you're about out of data and you check your Mac and you realize that your backup program has been not following the rules that you set perhaps and sending way more than it needed to, this could be something that gives you an indicator of what's going on. Cloud sync services, automatic updates, streaming apps, they are all typically the top consumers there. It's also worth a glance for security awareness because if you see a process you don't recognize and it's sending a whole heck of a lot of data over the network or receiving a whole heck of a lot of data over the network, well check it out, see what the heck is going on and make sure that you take care of it. Something very handy for kind of security management. Lastly, as I mentioned, there may be a reason for you to keep the activity monitor in your dock. Why? Well, well because you can actually see live graphs right in your dock. If you right click the activity monitor in your dock and you hover over dock icon here, you can ask it to show CPU usage, CPU history, network usage and disk activity. CPU usage usage is the way to see a color coded bar that shows your current CPU load. CPU history is a scrolling graph of recent CPU activity. And of course network and disk activity will give you that information as well. But watch when I choose show CPU usage. If I come back to cpu I can see the items that are making use of my Mac at this point, my Mac CPU at this point, and that little Bar gives me an idea. I can also change it to show CPU history and in that case, again, it's a square with little bits of color showing how CPU load has gone up and down. Personally, between the two, I like CPU usage. It's a live version of this and at any point, if you don't want to see this, you can go back and choose Show Application Icon to have it switched off. I find it very handy to see what's going on right down here in the dock icon and get an idea. At any point what your Mac is doing without having to have Activity Monitor running with the window up, you need to have it running in the background. So some thoughts. You can of course set Activity Monitor to open at login. That's very easy to do by right clicking on the icon, going to options like we did earlier for keep and dock and choosing Open at login and then set the dock icon to show CPU history or CPU load. Then, you know, simply downsize. Hide the Activity Monitor window when it launches. This gives you a constant ambient view of your Mac CPU activity right there in the dock. So when something spikes, you'll notice immediately. Now, to be clear, there are other apps out there that will do this. I've talked about them before, lots of third party options. And as you know, as you saw, there aren't options for memory or energy. It's just cpu, disk and network. So if you're looking for memory pressure or battery pressure, well, then you need a third party menu bar tool. But having that graphing right down there is quite nice. The other reason, and frankly the main reason that most people launch Activity Monitor, we'll head back to macOS is to get rid of a process. Okay, so in order to kill a process that is running that is at issue, there's something going on that's causing it to malfunction. You can select that process in let's arrange this by process name. You can select that process in Activity Monitor and then you hit the stop icon in the top bar and it pops up two options. Well, three options technically. Quit, Force, quit and cancel. Cancel obviously keeps you from doing that. There's quit and there's force Quit. Quit allows for a sort of graceful end to the app. If there's. If the application is responsive, as in it's showing up there in black text, not red text, then a simple quit is what you want to do. Try quit first if possible, because that will let the app save its state. Force quit is when something's not responding. So, so this is when you would want that, but you'll also want it. You're probably going, well, why don't I just quit the app? How I usually do Command Q or going up to the menu bar. Right, you can do that. This is really not for just quitting an app. This is for quitting or force quitting processes, because you may have access to the app. But look at this 1Password app. Hidden beneath the 1Password app are all of these various processes that are running as well. The 1Password browser helper, the 1Password helper, the 1Password password helper that runs on GPU, the 1Password crash handler, the other 1Password crash handler, and the other 1Password crash handler, as well as a. Oh, that's, that's the next thing. So that gives you an idea of some of the buried processes that might be part of an app that you have. And if just that process is hanging, then you can get rid of it temporarily and have the app handle relaunching it if you'd like. You can double click on any process here and get what's called. Well, you can inspect it essentially to get information about this specific process. So I can see memory usage, I can see statistics of this app, and I can see if there are any Open Files and Ports. The Open Files and Ports tab pretty cool because it shows every file and resource that the process currently has open. So if you've ever been working on something and you get that annoying, this file is currently in use and you're wondering where the heck this is coming from, this could tell you which process is holding it, which is pretty neat. So I can see the different parts of this aspect that are in use by 1Password and what all is involved there in statistics as well. And again, memory. Now with this, the statistics are going to show you metrics like thread counts and idle wakeups. So this is kind of, kind of debugging. It gets really kind of in depth. But I really think that Open Files and Ports tab is pretty doggone neat. I should also mention that on top of using Activity Monitor to take a look at these different processes and activate, or rather not activate, but terminate them, if you hold down command hold on option and hit Escape, it will pop up a specific window, a sort of special built standalone window that lets you force quit applications. So this is if you don't want to go digging through Activity Monitor to find a specific app, this will give you a way to quickly force quit an app that is hung. Instead of trying to dig through all of the 1Password processes to find the actual 1Password app, simply clicking or holding down command option and hitting Escape to bring up that force Quit applications tool can V be much easier to do. All right, so let's put this all together. The real situations where Activity Monitor earns its keep. Perhaps you log in, you're using your Mac, and you go, weird. My Mac is pretty slow today. What's going on here? Well, open the Memory tab, check the memory pressure graph. If it's yellow or red, well, that's your answer. You can close some apps, you can close some browser tabs. If it's green, then switch to the CPU tab and look for any one process that might be eating a disproportionate amount of CPU. What if you're using your MacBook and you look up and your battery is running low? Well, if your battery is draining fast, you can probably imagine you're going to open the Energy tab. You sort by Energy impact. The top of the list is your problem. Obviously, many issues that are typically part of this. Well, browser tabs, running videos or animations, video conferencing apps, because those running in the background will eat a lot of battery and then some creative apps. So just quit what you don't need. And then what about you using your Mac? You pull out your headphones and you go, what in the. What is that noise? Oh, wait, my fans are running. Why is what. Open the CPU tab. Sort by percentage cpu, because the stuff that is hitting that CPU is probably what's heating up the chip. Look for anything that's consistently high. You can also switch to the Energy tab and look at the GPU column. You'll notice that I actually added the GPU column. I should say you'll notice and then not show you on macOS. You'll notice that in Activity Monitor, I added GPU to my main CPU page so that I could see that as well. Because. Because sometimes, as it turns out, the fans are spinning because of the GPU load, not the CPU load, especially during video playback and rendering. All right, that's a look at Activity Monitor. And if you'd like a little bit of homework, well, I've got some for you before you come back next week. For the next episode, consider adding Activity Monitor. Your dock. Set it to open at log. Set the dock icon to show CPU history. You can right click and add that kind column to your CPU tab so you can scroll through and see if anything's running Intel. Because the Rosetta thing is about to come to a close. Those need to be updated before Mac OS 27 and the next time something feels off on your Mac, because you've got Activity Monitor right there in your dock, you'll remember, oh, I'm going to open Activity Monitor first and use that to figure out exactly what I need to do. Try to see if you can figure out what's happening from what it tells you. And when you do, because I have faith in you when you do, email me micahwit TV because I would love to hear how things went for you. Activity Monitor. Honestly, looking at it, not gonna win any beauty contests or design awards, but I think it's one of the most quietly powerful tools on your Mac. It's your own way to troubleshoot what might be going wrong. It tells you exactly what's happening. It does so in real time. And it's not guesswork. It's literally the stuff that people who troubleshoot for a living are using to understand what's going on in the machine other than console. But we won't talk about that today. Once you're comfortable reading the five tabs and you've got a live CPU graph in your dock, you're going to find yourself reaching for it anytime something feels off. And I remind you myself, I need to as well. With that battery issue from before, you'll have a much better understanding of what your Mac is actually doing. So try it for a week and you might be surprised what you find running in the background. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Hands on Apple. I'll be back again next week. Bye Bye.