What Is Activity Monitor The Mac Equivalent of Task Manager
Activity Monitor is the Mac equivalent of Windows Task Manager. It displays the various resources used on your system in real time. These include processes, disk activity, memory usage, and more to provide a dashboard of sorts about what’s going on on your Mac.
We’ll show you how to read and use Activity Monitor for Mac. 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 resides in Applications > Utilities. To open it, press Cmd + Space to launch Spotlight. Then type the first few letters of the app and press Return when Activity Monitor appears at the top of the list. However, there are several other ways to open and interact with the Mac Resource Monitor. Here’s our guide on how to open Task Manager on Mac.
In Activity Monitor, there are five System Monitor indicators that provide you with real-time statistics and graphs of resource usage over time. The data can be useful for troubleshooting problems on your Mac. We’ll describe each of these options below.
1. Monitor CPU with Activity Monitor
The CPU tab shows how each process is using your computer’s processor. You’ll see what percentage of the total CPU a process is using (% CPU), how long it’s been active (CPU Time), how often a process wakes up from sleep (Idle Wake Up), and more. .
At the bottom of the screen, you’ll also see a graph and percentage of your CPU used by system (red) and user (blue).
The mds and mdworker processes associated with Spotlight may show frequent CPU spikes during indexing. This is perfectly normal for a new or recently formatted Mac. The process will end automatically upon completion.
The kernel_task process manages your Mac’s temperature by limiting CPU access to processes that use the CPU intensively. It is normal to see that it consumes more CPU over time. Thankfully, you can fix “kernel_task” high CPU usage on your Mac.
A web browser may show high CPU usage when rendering too many tabs or displaying multimedia content such as videos.
Cloudd is the daemon process that deals with syncing iCloud data. If you see an increase in CPU usage, it is not indicative of a problem. Once syncing is complete, %CPU should decrease.
View CPU usage and history
Click the Window menu to open CPU Usage, CPU History, and GPU History in a separate window. Info will give you information about your overall CPU usage. The CPU History window shows the user and system load on each core over time.
2. Memory tab in Activity Monitor
The Memory tab displays how much RAM your Mac is using. Along with the CPU, this is your Mac’s main performance indicator. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see a real-time memory graph with values that can help you diagnose performance issues.
Check if Your Mac Needs More RAM
The memory pressure graph shows the current status of memory resource usage through different colors. Green means there are enough memory resources available, while red means your Mac has run out of memory and needs more RAM to function efficiently.
Borderline yellow is a warning sign. Check to see if any apps are using up memory and causing increased memory pressure. If so, quit the app.
View cached files memory usage
Cached files is another useful parameter. It tells you how much memory is currently used by apps, but is still available for other apps to take up. For example, if you quit Apple Mail after using it for a while, its data will become part of the memory used by cached files.
If you launch the Mail app again, it will launch faster. But if another app needs RAM, macOS will dynamically remove the cached data and allocate it to other apps.
If the cached files are consuming a lot of memory, don’t worry about it. As long as memory pressure is green, it shouldn’t be a concern. You may need more RAM in the future, but before that, check out some common mistakes that slow down your Mac. Since Apple silicon Macs have an integrated system on chip, your only option is to quit the app.