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My Mac is running so slowly, and I don’t know why.
Seeing beach balls? Don’t get your eyes checked. Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities) shows all the currently running applications and processes, updating in real time. Click the %CPU column to see how much of your Mac’s processor capacity is being chomped up by each process at any given moment.
The processes with app icons next to them should be recognizable as applications. If your CPU hog turns out to be iPhoto importing pics or iTunes syncing your iPhone, just wait until it’s done. But if it’s an app you’re not even using, go ahead and quit it, either from the Dock or by selecting it in Activity Monitor and clicking Quit Process. A dialog will offer to Quit or Force Quit; quitting is better unless the app is unresponsive.
If you notice that iTunes is using the lion’s share of your CPU because you’re rocking out with the Visualizer on, turn off the Visualizer (Command-T). If your browser has a million tabs open and you’re playing Flash videos, either close most of the tabs or cut way back on CPU-hogging Flash usage with a blocker like ClickToFlash on Safari or FlashBlock for Firefox. If you’re a YouTube junkie, visit youtube.com/html5 to join the HTML5 trial and view available videos that way.
Seeing beach balls? Don’t get your eyes checked. Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities) shows all the currently running applications and processes, updating in real time. Click the %CPU column to see how much of your Mac’s processor capacity is being chomped up by each process at any given moment.
The processes with app icons next to them should be recognizable as applications. If your CPU hog turns out to be iPhoto importing pics or iTunes syncing your iPhone, just wait until it’s done. But if it’s an app you’re not even using, go ahead and quit it, either from the Dock or by selecting it in Activity Monitor and clicking Quit Process. A dialog will offer to Quit or Force Quit; quitting is better unless the app is unresponsive.
Firefox hogs a lot of CPU power playing Flash videos, and that Visualizer in iTunes does too.
Processes with no little icons and less-recognizable names are background processes, and you shouldn’t go quitting them willy-nilly—never quit anything until you know what it is. Instead, Google its name to figure out what it does. For example, if your external Time Machine drive is being indexed by Spotlight with the process mds, mds will use a ton of your CPU while Time Machine is working. Don’t quit the mds process; instead, exclude that drive from Spotlight indexing (System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy).If you notice that iTunes is using the lion’s share of your CPU because you’re rocking out with the Visualizer on, turn off the Visualizer (Command-T). If your browser has a million tabs open and you’re playing Flash videos, either close most of the tabs or cut way back on CPU-hogging Flash usage with a blocker like ClickToFlash on Safari or FlashBlock for Firefox. If you’re a YouTube junkie, visit youtube.com/html5 to join the HTML5 trial and view available videos that way.
Activity Monitor shows that out of our Mac’s 4GB of RAM, a little over half is active. So we’re okay.
Back in Activity Monitor, you’ll notice some graphs at the bottom. Click the System Memory tab and check out how much of your RAM you’re using. If the yellow part of the pie chart (Active RAM) is almost the whole graph, consider adding more RAM.