If you have trouble accessing the Internet, there can be numerous causes.

You can sort by Sent Bytes, Rcvd Bytes, Sent Packets, or Rcvd Packets. This tab shows how much data is entering and leaving your Mac over its network interfaces for active apps and processes. If this number is high, it could be because you downloaded a lot of music or movies, added a lot of photos to your Photos library, or you have worked on a lot of files in iCloud Drive. One process that may show a lot of activity is cloudd, which is the background process that handles reading and writing data from iCloud. Reading from and writing to a disk also uses power, so if you see a lot of disk activity, and your battery isn’t lasting as long as you expect, have a look at which apps are doing this. This shows how much data is being written to and read from your Mac’s drives. Most users don’t need to worry about the Disk tab.

You might try using, say, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, each for a few days, to see which one uses the least amount of power. This can be a good way of deciding which web browser to use on your laptop. If your laptop’s battery life is insufficient, check here to see if you’re using an app that’s depleting the battery. This shows which apps use the most power over the past twelve hours, including time when your Mac was asleep. The most important column is 12 hr Power. The Energy Impact column updates regularly, and it shows the current power usage, but this varies a great deal depending in which apps you use. For a desktop Mac, this isn’t very important, but if you’re seeing poor battery life on a laptop, this is the place to check. The Energy tab tells you which apps and processes use the most power. If after a system restart you find that your Mac is still running slowly, have a look at our in-depth guide on how to fix your Mac’s performance issues. This is a good indication that it’s time to restart your computer. Reading memory data from these is much slower than reading from RAM, and if there is a large amount of swap space used, your Mac will run slowly. Swap files are virtual memory files that are written to your Mac’s disk. You may even want to find replacements for apps that regularly max out your RAM.Īlso check the bottom section, where you see Swap Used. You can find the most RAM-hungry apps, and, if your Mac is running slowly, you can choose to quit them. This tab gives you an idea of how much RAM your apps are using. Read about other methods for force quitting apps on macOS.

If this doesn’t work, click Force Quit, and, in almost all cases, Activity Monitor will be able to quit the app, removing the offending laggard. If you click Quit, it will try to quit the app in the normal manner. Activity Monitor will ask if you are sure you want to quit this process. If you find an app that’s not running correctly-or one that shows in red, with the words “Not Responding” after it-click that app’s or process’s name, and then click the X button in the toolbar. In some cases, these may be runaway apps that are stuck. If, for example, the fan on your Mac becomes loud, or you see the battery on your laptop depleting quickly, check the CPU tab to see which apps are taxing the processor. This tab lets you know which apps are working the hardest. You may see apps or processes that are using more than 100% of CPU time this is because a Mac with multiple cores (all new Macs) count each core as 100%. In the above screenshot, I’ve sorted the list by % CPU, or the percentage of the total available CPU time. The CPU tab shows how your Mac’s processor(s) are working. I’ll discuss what you can see on each of these tabs and how they might be useful when diagnosing problems on a Mac. Thy are CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, and Network, and, if your Mac is running the content caching service, you’ll also see a Cache tab. There you’ll see a simple app with five tabs, and a list of entries that changes every few seconds.Įach of the five tabs inside Activity Monitor keep track of certain aspects of your Mac’s performance. To find Activity Monitor on a Mac, go to your Applications folder > Utilities folder, and then double-click Activity Monitor. In this article, I’m going to introduce you to Activity Monitor, and explain how this utility can help you find-and, in some cases, resolve-problems on your Mac. One of the tools you can use to troubleshoot problems on a Mac is Activity Monitor, a dashboard for many of your Mac’s under-the-hood activities. Narrowing down the cause of such problems can be difficult fortunately, macOS offers some troubleshooting tools you can use to diagnose what ails your computer. Sometimes some of your apps don’t work, your Mac gets slow, you get a spinning beachball, and more. We never like to have problems with our computers, but they are inevitable. Software & Apps How to Use Activity Monitor to Troubleshoot Mac Problems

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