Does your computer feel sluggish? Does it pinwheel or take a long time to open Apps? If so there is a great OS X Utility called Activity Monitor that allows a user to see why these things may be happening. Please study the image below.
As you can see at the top there are 4 tabs(CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, and Network). You can open Activity Monitor by selecting Go-Utilities-Activity monitor in the Finder Tab.
CPU – CPU stands for Central Processing Unit and is the brain of the computer. When the CPU tab is selected, all current processes will be listed on the left side, from most usage intensive to least. This is important because it allows you to see what processes are bogging down the CPU. It is listed as a percent so a task taking more than 50% of your CPU is concerning. Take note of what it may be and do some research. Some processes are part of the operating system and it may be normal for them to hog the CPU, but an obvious problem to look for would be Mackeeper. This is Anti-Virus software that is not needed on a Mac and noting its CPU usage can help in determining why your computer may be running slow.
Memory – This is possibly one of the most useful tabs in Activity Monitor. A lot of times I have customers that have upgraded to Yosemite and start experiencing a lot of pinwheeling. When the memory tab is selected, it works in the same way as the CPU tab. The process that is using the most memory is listed at the top, and least at the bottom. I personally like to pay attention to the bottom left corner. As you can see it shows how much memory you have, and how much is being used as a total. The top and second postings are most important. Don’t pay too much attention to Virtual Memory and Swap Used. As you can see in the picture above, we have 16GB of memory and 15.98GB is being used. This is not good. Our memory on this computer is maxing out. This computer is due for a RAM upgrade.
Energy – I have not used this as much but if you are experiencing short battery life, this is a good place to check and see what processes are taking the most power.
Disk – This tab is helpful in determining what processes are currently writing and reading to your hard drive. For the basic user, this tab may not be important. I would pay more attention to your total used and free space of your hard drive. his can be found by clicking on the apple, about this mac, and then the storage tab. As long as you have 5GB to 10GB of free space you should be fine.
Network – Similar the other tabs, the network tab allows you to see what processes are currently taking network bandwidth. Although this can be very useful in determining a slow network, it won’t necessarily help determine a sluggish computer overall.
Whether or not your computer is running slow, Activity Monitor is a very cool tool. I use it all the time here at the counter. Just remember, you should not be using more than 50% of your memory when only Activity Monitor is open and nothing else. I like to call this idling. With no other Apps open, nothing should be taxing the computer. If you do find that you are using more RAM than normal, or a certain process is hogging the CPU, a visit to Small Dog may be in order.