![]() This is the percentage of the overall processing power in the system being used by the process, and is relative to one CPU core, so many times in multiprocessor systems you will see a process take up 150% of the CPU, which indicates in a 2-core system that 75% of the total CPU power is being used by that process. There are ways to temporarily promote a user to "root" in order to manage other processes, but we will not discuss that here. The root user technically owns "everything" in the system, but system users by default can only directly control the subset of processes that they own. When the system boots up, the initial "launchd" process is started under the "root" user, and subsequent processes launched under this "launchd" umbrella are owned by this same user. This is the owner of the process, or the active user under which the process was started. The ones with abbreviated names such as "ntpd" or "hidd" are background processes that provide system support but for the most part aren't directly managed by the user. The process name is the common name for the application, such as "Mail", or "Finder". Every process is associated with its own Process ID, the Process ID of it's "parent" process, and the process group of which it is a member (generally the "parent" process). Progressively higher-level system processes are given PIDs up to approximately 200, with processes starting from user accounts being given higher process numbers. For instance, the kernel is given number 0, followed by 1 for the parent "launchd" process. Processes can technically be given any number that is not in use however, the system will use number ranges to separate different processes by levels of importance. There are literally thousands of processes, and understanding which external resource each one is connecting to or what’s trying to connect to processes on your computer is a huge pain.Whenever processes are started in OS X, they are given a unique identifier number, which can be used to identify it for recognition by other commands (for example, the "kill" utility that terminates processes). If you’ll take a look at all the processes running in the Network pane of the Activity Monitor, half of them will probably not make any sense or are probably too complicated to understand. Every application that you use on your Mac sends or receives something, be it your email, RSS reader, and more. Your computer is probably connected to the Internet 24/7, and whether you’re using it or not, your Mac is constantly exchanging data with servers elsewhere. ![]() You can switch the graph to show either, though data is probably the more useful of the two. Blue shows data received, and red shows data sent. The information at the bottom shows network usage in packets and amount of data. ![]() The Network pane shows how much data your Mac is sending or receiving over your network (and the internet). If the problems are characterized by delays, “spinning beach balls,” and occasionally a message from the operating system indicating that it can’t read or write to the drive, the odds are that the hard drive has problems. So if the available space on your Mac startup disk is less than 10 GB (absolute minimum), it’s time to free up some disk space. These problems are even more likely to occur when your startup disk is nearly full, physical RAM is exhausted, and free disk space is consumed by swap files. RELATED: How to Free Up Disk Space on a Mac
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |