This handy utility displays all the processes currently running on your Mac, along with the CPU cycles, RAM, and other resources they are using, and allows you to quit them.

If you notice your Mac is running slowly, you keep seeing the beachball, or applications keep crashing, the first step is to check Activity Monitor. Modern Macs with multiple CPU cores can run dozens of processes simultaneously, and it’s rare for any single process to cause your Mac to come to a halt and cause the dreaded spinning beachball to appear, but it’s not unheard of. Tasks may be initiated by the macOS, an application running in the background, or you, the user, when you issue a command by making a selection in a menu or dialog box. It’s a task or set of tasks running at OS level or within an application that allows you to do whatever it is you’re trying to do on your Mac. In this article, we’ll show you how to track down and kill those processes. Sometimes, fixing a problem with a slow Mac can be as simple as killing the rogue process after you’ve worked out which one is causing the problem. Those tasks are known as processes, and at any one time, there are dozens running, most of which you’ll be completely unaware of. However, often it’s not the whole application that’s a problem, just a handful of tasks that are running within it. If your Mac starts running very slowly or grinds to a halt, the problem is usually caused by a rogue application hogging CPU cycles or RAM.

But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

How to kill process of automator mac