3/1/2024 0 Comments Using activity monitor macUnfortunately, Activity Monitor doesn’t provide any information on core frequency, which is only available using the command tool powermetrics.ĬPU Time is the total available processing time that has been used by a process. A P core with 100% active residency at a frequency of 3 GHz processes instructions at three times the rate of the same P core at 100% and a frequency of 1 GHz, yet both will be shown in Activity Monitor as being at 100% CPU. Although the former affects some Intel processors, both are most significant on Apple silicon. Thus, processes totalling 100% CPU on my eight-core Intel CPU mean that its cores spend 700% idle, and there’s still a total core reserve of 1500% allowing for the maximum achievable with hyperthreading.įor cores with variable frequency, no allowance is made for any change in core frequency, nor for different types of core. The counterpart to % CPU is that the percentage not accounted for in % CPU is spent idle. This is complicated for Intel processors with support for hyperthreading, which adds a further 100% for each core, resulting in full % CPU rising to a maximum of 1600 for those same eight cores. If your Mac’s chip has 8 cores in all, then as each can run to 100%, when all eight cores are fully active, the total % CPU comes to 800. Total active residency is measured for each core, then added together. Thus, in a given 10 second period, if 25% of the cycles are spent processing WindowServer code, the % CPU for that period is 25%. It seems to be based on the active residency of each core, that’s the percentage of processor cycles which aren’t idle, but actively processing threads owned by a given process. It’s also misleadingly inaccurate on Apple silicon chips. % CPU is a rough measure of the amount of time on the CPU cores that a process has run, but isn’t a true percentage out of a hundred. To help you understand and compare them, I’ll try to explain what I think the less obvious numbers mean. Now there are also Apple silicon Macs, some of the figures don’t quite tally across architectures. When all Macs were Intel, even if we couldn’t necessarily define some of them, it wasn’t hard to work out roughly what each meant. Compression is preferred to swapping because it makes more room for memory and doesn’t slow down your Mac.Activity Monitor provides many different numbers for aspects of your Mac’s performance. These two parameters tell you how much active process data was swapped out to the startup drive or compressed to save space. Since Apple silicon Macs have an integrated system on a chip, your only option is to quit the app. You might need more RAM in the future but, before that, check out some common mistakes that slow down your Mac. As long as memory pressure is green, it shouldn’t be a concern. If Cached Files is consuming a lot of memory, don’t fret about it. But if another app needs RAM, macOS will dynamically remove cached data and allocate it to other apps. If you re-launch the Mail app, it’ll launch faster. 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. This tells you how much memory is presently used by apps, but is still available for other apps to take. Once the syncing completes, the %CPU should get reduced.Ĭached Files is another useful parameter. If you see a spike in CPU usage, this doesn’t indicate a problem. Cloudd is the daemon process that deals with syncing iCloud data.A web browser may show high CPU usage while rendering too many tabs or displaying multimedia content like video.Thankfully, you can fix “kernel_task” high CPU usage on your Mac. It’s common to see this consume more CPU over time.
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