HOW TO CHECK ACTIVITY MONITOR
HOW CAN I MAKE AN
APP CLOSE WHEN IT
REFUSES?AN APP IS BEHAVING
WEIRDLY. WHAT
SHOULD I DO TO
FIX IT?maclife.com MAR 2020 191
Open Activity Monitor
Activity Monitor is provided as part of
macOS and lives in the Utilities folder inside
Applications. To open it quickly, just hit
Cmd+Space Bar to launch Spotlight, type
“activity” and, when it comes up, hit Return.
2
Look around the system
On the left, you’ll see all the processes
running on your Mac. You’ll recognize some
of these as apps, with their icons. Others will
be more obscure. Pick Windowed Processes
from the View menu to see only apps.3
Browse for info
Click the Process Name column header
to put everything in alphabetical order, or
another heading to sort by what resources
each process is using. Click the Disk tab at
the top to see what’s accessing storage.
4
Spot the slowcoach
Click the CPU tab and rank by “% CPU”
to see what’s taking up a lot of processor
time, potentially slowing down your Mac. If
you see “nsurlstoraged”, that’s Safari: close
pages you don’t need and see the % drop.5
Scan for outliers
Spotlight updates its index using
processes named “md” (for “metadata”).
Consider adding drives to System Prefs >
Time Machine > Options to exclude them.
6
May contain nuts
If “kernel_task” is hyperactive it may be
trying to stop the CPU overheating. If you’re
not doing something fancy in an app, try
resetting the SMC (see page 22).Close the app using File >
Quit, Cmd+Q, or if necessary
force–quit (see below). Open
it again. If it’s still not okay,
check its menus, the App
Store or its website for
updates to install. Install
any updates to macOS
(in Catalina’s System
Preferences, or in App Store
> Updates. Restart your Mac
and open the app. Still not
okay? In the Finder, go to
~/ Library/Preferences (see
“Where’s my library?” on
page 21) and drag anything
named after that app to the
Trash. If it works, you may
lose some settings.To avoid clogging memory,
quit an app when you stop
using it (File > Quit or
Cmd+Q). If the app’s “hung”
and ignores you, hold Opt,
click and hold the app’s icon
in the Dock, and pick Force
Quit. Or choose Force Quit
from the Apple menu (Opt+
Cmd+Esc) and pick an app.
Unsaved work may be lost.Image rights from: Apple.
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