This tutorial will detail how you can view a disk usage and storage summary on a Mac. Accessing the Mac Disk Usage Summary. If you want to check a Macs disk space and disk usage, this is one of the simplest ways to do so. Simple Ways to Reduce Memory Usage on Mac (MacBook Pro, Air, iMac) Tweet “No matter what I do, my Mac is still slow”, an average tech consultant hears this phrase multiple times a day.
Are you concerned about the memory usage of your MacBook Pro, iMac, or MacBook Air? Well, you should be. Imagine a plane, the cockpit of which is stripped of flight instruments. If a dashboard of the plane doesn’t have gyroscopic, pitot-static, and navigational systems, its pilot won’t be able to control the flight. To see the readings of the flight instruments means to have relevant information about altitude, airspeed, and direction, which are essential for safe takeoffs and landings.
By the same token, a Mac should be equipped with instruments allowing its owner to safely navigate the machine. Do I even have to point the obvious and state that every machine running under macOS has a way of monitoring its internal processes and activities? The best thing about Macs is that even novice users can view information about apps, background processes, and memory allocation by using a built-in utility called Activity Monitor. Therefore, there is no need for a perfect command of Terminal and command line to assess the amount of available memory on a Mac. So what is Activity Monitor?
The app is used to show how much wired memory, physical memory, compressed memory, and app memory is used by apps and macOS processes. Activity Monitor indicates memory pressure and helps make more RAM available. The utility is supplied with older versions of Mac OS X such as El Captain and newer versions of macOS such as High Sierra. In this article, we will explain in detail what to do when the performance of your Mac drops because of RAM issues while you wonder “Why is my system memory usage so high?” By no means you should operate your Mac without taking heed of its memory usage (it’s akin to flying a plane while being blindfolded). The article explains how to monitor and understand memory usage of a Mac with the help of Activity Monitor.
If no matter what you do your Mac is painfully slow, it’s time to review its memory usage and purge some memory agents, thereby allocating additional RAM to key processes. The most reliable indicator of the need to decrease memory consumption is a system message that reads “Your system has run out of application memory.” If you ask “Do I have to wait for the message to lower the memory usage of my computer?”, the answer is “No.” It is much better to regularly monitor the memory allocation to ensure that the Mac breathes freely. The instrument you need to reduce the memory usage on your Apple-designed computer is Activity Monitor. If after launching the utility and examining the key indicators, you see that system memory usage is very high, the chances are that your Mac is running too many apps and processes concurrently. To understand the details of memory usage on the machine, it is necessary to delve deeper into the readings of Activity Monitor. This will help you to free up memory resources, thereby improving Mac’s performance.
The extent of compression and paging is expressed through the chart’s height. When the chart is green, there are no processes you should clear because no compression is occurring. However, when the chart turns yellow, it means that inactive memory is compressed to allocate more RAM to active apps and processes. The red color indicates that there are no cached files to compress, which initiates virtual memory swapping. If you are asking “How much free memory should I have on my Mac?”, the answer is simple: the amount of free memory should be enough to keep the memory chart green most of the time.
Here’s what you can do to free up RAM.
In one of our previous articles, we gave instructions on using Activity Monitor. Today we are going to study Activity Monitor in greater depth and learn how to check CPU usage on Mac. The Activity Monitor utility is a Mac performance monitor which shows what programs are running and how many resources they use. Those who do not know where Activity monitor is can find it in the Finder → Applications folder, in a Launchpad or via Spotlight. If you notice that the system’s performance is slowing down, most likely some application is not working absolutely correctly. Fluent sorting of CPU usage will help you identify a conflicting application.
CPU usage on Mac Based on the results of your Mac system monitor, you can optimize your computer’s performance by stopping hovering processes or closing heavy apps. And here are the buttons you will need:. Force a process to quit – close the hung app easily with a Close button. Select the process and click the “X” icon. Information – see information about the selected process.
Click the “I” icon and view the details: real memory size, virtual memory size, shared memory size, private memory size, statistics, open files and ports. The Settings button helps to collect the most complete information about the selected process. You can introduce it in several ways: sample process, spindump, system diagnostics, spotlight diagnostics. However, if you are not a developer or Mac geek, this information might be difficult to understand.
Usage graph Beside the main window, the Mac CPU monitor can be viewed in separate windows. Go to Menu Bar → Window → and select CPU usage or CPU history. In most cases, the user does not need complete and comprehensive information. Therefore, you can change the app’s icon in the Dock to monitor CPU usage.
All you need to do is to open a context menu and select what would you like to see. Now you know everything about the Mac resource monitor and can successfully deal with an unresponsive system.
If you use Activity Monitor mostly to view the heavy apps and force quit them, we would recommend a great free app. It is designed to clear RAM memory but has some additional features which let you force close processes, including those which run in the background.
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