Activity monitor is a program on a Mac which shows all the CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage. This program comes in handy if you want overall report of your Mac. There are different sections which you can switch between, to get all the information.
Activity monitor shows the user all device activities in a single Window.
Let’s Get Started About Activity Monitor
By clicking View you can choose what processes are shown in Activity Monitor.
All Processes: Shows all the processes of the system.
All Processes Hierarchically: Shows all the processes in parent and child relationship form.
My processes: Shows processes of the current user account.
System processes: Shows Mac OS processes.
Other User processes: Shows processes from other accounts.
Active Processes: Shows all the current running processes.
Inactive Processes: Shows all the sleeping processes.
Windowed processes: Shows all the processes that can open windows.
Selected processes: Shows only the process that you have selected.
Applications in last 12 hours: Apps that are running processes in last 12 hours.
1. CPU
When you click on CPU it will show all the processor related information.
Different information shown in CPU section:
%CPU: Percentage of the CPU used by the application.
CPU Time: Total time for which CPU is used.
Information shown in the bottom section.
System: It shows the percentage of CPU used by the system.
User: It shows the percentage of CPU used by user’s apps.
Idle: It shows the percentage of unused CPU.
CPU Load: It is a graphical representation of the CPU usage. You can set the intervals in View > Update Frequency.
Threads: It shows number of threads used by processes.
Processes: It shows number of running processes.
2. Memory
This section shows all the information about the memory.
Memory: Total memory used by the application
Compressed Mem: Total memory that is compressed for the application.
Information included in bottom section:
Memory Pressure: It shows current load on memory graphically.
Different color indicates state of the memory:
Green shows available memory.
Yellow shows memory that is being tasked by the memory management process.
Red shows used memory.
Physical Memory: Total RAM installed on the machine.
Memory Used: Total memory currently in use.
Cached Files: It shows amount of memory that is cached by the applications and processes. Applications use cache memory for fast loading. This memory can also be used by other applications.
Swap Used: Total space used on Mac OS startup drive by memory management.
App Memory: Total Memory used by applications and their processes.
Wired Memory: Amount of memory that cannot be moved onto the Mac’s drive. This memory cannot be used by other processes and it depends on the application.
Compressed: Total RAM that is compressed for other processes.
3. Energy
Energy section shows the amount of energy used by the applications.
Information included in Energy section:
Energy Impact: Energy Impact represents the energy consumption by the applications. To view energy impact from different processes of the application, click on arrow in front of application.
Avg Energy Impact: This section shows average energy impact that an application has on Mac.
App Nap: Applications that have the capability of taking a nap will be shown.
Preventing Sleep: It shows the status of the application which shows if it can prevent your Mac from sleeping or not.
Information on the bottom:
Energy Impact: It is a graphical representation of the total energy used by the applications
Graphic Card: It shows the type of graphic card which is currently being used. High perf means that it is using high performance graphic and Integrated means it is using integrated graphic.
Remaining Charge: Level of battery remaining on your portable Mac.
Time Until Full: Time remaining for battery to become fully charged.
Time on AC: Total time on which Mac is on AC power.
Time Remaining: Estimated time the Portable Mac will continue to work on battery.
Time on Battery: Total running time of Mac since it is running on battery.
Battery (Last 12 hours): The level of battery in the last 12 hours. When the Mac is on AC it will be in green color.
With increase in energy of Mac its battery power decreases. To increase battery life, close any application that is high on energy impact.
4. Disk
The Disk section provides all the information about the disk being used by the MAC.
Bytes Written: Data written by the application on the disk.
Bytes Read: Data read by the application from the disk.
Kind: Type of data being read and written on the disk.
User: It shows the account from which data being is written.
Information on the bottom panel:
Reads in: Total number of time Mac access the disk to read the data.
Writes out: Total number of time Mac access the disk to write the data.
Data read: Total data which is read.
Data Written: Total data written.
5. Network
Network section shows all the information about data being sent and received over the network. In this section you will see all the application and their network usage.
Sent Bytes: Total number of Bytes sent over the network.
Rcvd Bytes: Total number of Bytes received.
Sent Packets: Total number of packets sent.
Rcvd Packets: Total number of packets received.
Information on the bottom panel:
On the bottom panel you can see all the network activity by all the applications.
Packets in: Total number of packets received over the network.
Packets out: Total number of packets sent over the network.
Data received: Total data received.
Data sent: Total data received.
Center graph shows total activity of the network in graphical method. Blue color shows the number of received packets or the total received data. The color red shows packets sent or total data sent. To change between data and packets you have to use pop-up menu.
Activity monitor on Mac shows all the information. Without checking individually, you can get all the information about Mac at one place. You can scroll between different categories according to the different information you need to check.