MacFormat UK – June 2019

macformat.com @macformat JUNE 2019 | MACFORMAT | 23

Speed up your Mac

First checks for bottlenecks

Take a look at these common problem areas before you go any further

ne of the most common

causes of a slow Mac is an

app or process misbehaving

and consuming more than

its fair share of resources, like memory,

processor cycles or network bandwidth.

The easiest way to check for this is to

use Activity Monitor.

Open it from /Applications/Utilities,

click its CPU tab, then click the %CPU

column so that the arrow is pointing

downwards. That will display processes

in the order of how many CPU cycles

they’re using, with the most active

at the top. Scan the list and look for

low-hanging fruit, like apps you’re

not using that are consuming tens of

percent of the CPU, or browser tabs

you don’t need doing the same.

To stop this, either quit the apps or

close the browser tabs, or use the Quit

Process button in Activity Monitor’s

toolbar. Be wary of quitting processes

if you don’t know what they do. If you

find one is hogging cycles, search for it

using Google to find out what it does.

Memory pressure

You can apply this technique in the

Memory tab. In this case there’s some

additional data you can inspect: the

Memory Pressure chart at the bottom

of the window. This shows how much

memory is in use, how much data is

being compressed to make more room

in memory, and how much has been

swapped out to your startup disk.

If the chart is green, there’s no

problem. If it’s yellow, data is being

compressed. If it’s red, your Mac is

using your startup disk to offload

contents and free up memory. That’s

only a real problem if your startup disk

is low on free space – say, less than

20GB. However, using your startup

disk to cache data will slow down your

Mac, especially if it’s a hard disk rather

than an SSD. Scan the list of processes

to identify the greatest memory users

and quit them if you aren’t using them.

You can find out more about Activity

Monitor at bit.ly/mfactmon.

Take a look under the Disk tab and you can track all the read and write actions

taking place on your hard disk – useful for spotting any unusual activity.

Switch to the Memory tab in Activity Monitor and you can see in broad

terms how well your Mac is handling the demands on its memory.

O

CPU

MEMORY DISK

Included as part of macOS, Activity Monitor presents a list of every app (or ‘process’ operating within

an app or macOS itself). You can easily spot which ones are hogging your Mac’s resources.

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