Activity Monitor

Hey guys, this is Matt from Kids On One. Today I'm going to be showing you about Activity Monitor on your Mac and how to use it. Some of you don't know the full features of it; some of you don't even know it's there, and some of you are kind of afraid of it. So, I'm just gonna be showing it to you along with several processes you might find with it that will be interesting to you.

First of all, I'll show you how to get there. You open a new Finder window, and then in the Go menu, you say Utilities. Then from here, it's pretty simple, and you just open Activity Monitor. So here's the main Activity Monitor window, and as you can see right here, there will be these tabs at the top that are pretty confusing at first. Like the Process ID is—I'll explain all these things to you in a second.

Basically, processes on your Mac are different programs, obviously, that run in the background. They can be executables, etc., like Process ID, Process Name, User, CPU, Threads, Real Memory, Virtual Memory, and the type or kind. So, I'm just gonna be showing you right here: Real Memory is the amount of actual RAM it's taking up, and Virtual Memory is the amount of your disk it's using. It just uses RAM.

As you can see, the Kernel task is actually the main operating system. It is taking up a lot of RAM and a lot of Virtual Memory, and of course, it's from my Intel chip. Right here, right here is another one: LaunchD. LaunchT launches every process that ever gets run, and if LaunchD is killed—what you actually can kill with a password—then no applications will open from then on, and you have to reboot your computer. You can't just reboot by pressing restart because there's another program that reboots your computer, which won't be able to run another one.

It's syslog, obviously, logs everything that happens pretty much. So, there are a few other ones like Login Window and your desktop, like this bar at the top and stuff. If you kill this, you won't be logged in anymore. Now, right here is another LaunchD running as your user. You see, LaunchT runs as every single user. So that when you do have permissions to kill, Spotlight is actually the Spotlight up here.

Okay, so yeah, Apple VNC server—if you have VNC enabled—and Dock is your Dock. There are a few others, but I won't go into those. So right here, the Process Name is just the process name. The Process ID is the unique ID number that no other process will have of your process. Every process has a unique Process ID, and when a process starts, it goes in right in order. The first process that's ever run is Kernel Task, and that's always zero, then it goes on from there. You'll notice that there's sometimes a big jump because there were things inside of here that died and stuff like that.

So, my highest process right now is Activity Monitor, and that one keeps on running again and again, but that's different. So yeah, Threads is how many different threads are open—I won't go into detail with that. The User is the user processes running because a process can run as any user, and depending on that user, the permissions of that process differ and the abilities of what that process can do differ. So processes run as root or normal system processes; there are also other users that are specifically made for demons and other types of things.

WWW is the HTTP server; here's the Window Server just from windowing tasks. So that's Activity Monitor so far. If you select a process, like another good one that I don't really care about, like bash, then you say Quit Process. You can say Force Quit; under the hood, it really forces. It's normally in Terminal, it will be "kill -9," which just sends the interrupt process or cancel. Inspect just shows you information about this process.

So, if you'd say Memory Statistics and Statistics, it shows you all the open ports, and that's interesting. The faults, the UNIX system calls—that is cool because you can check out how many system calls it's done—and then their open files and ports. You can see all the files that the program is reading, so you can go through and check every program that's reading EXE passwords. Oh, look, this program I've never installed called "Super Cool Viruses" is reading past when I'm gonna kill it.

Also, Sample will just show you kind of a list of things that it's calling; it's like the stack, so that's pretty cool. Okay, this is the Parent Process. The Parent Process shows you the process that started it, and that's Login. The process that started that is Dashboard Client; inside of that is Dock; inside of that has LaunchD; inside of that is the first LaunchD, and inside of that is Kernel. And then Kernel, you know, there is no parent for Kernel—Kernel starts everything. So that's the process system and how parents work. Other processes start more processes.

Also, you can say the CPU usage down here, and the CPU usage is the total usage of all your CPU units—Central Processing Units. Mine—my processor is dual-core, so it has two CPUs right here working off, and you can see 75 processes, and this is the use, etc. So here's the memory and statistics and data.

Okay, so that's just this. Disk activity is how much disk is being written and read. Data read isn't as much as data written because right now I'm recording this, and as we speak, data is being written to my disk. If I say I/O, less stuff is being written, but this is it. So this disk usage is just like an overall thing. I can select any disk.

Now, network—this is my network usage. I've been sending a lot more data than I've been receiving, but right now, of course, I'm receiving a lot of data because of mouse movements, keyboard presses—because I'm on screen sharing. Of course, I'm sending a lot more data because I'm sending in my screen every two seconds, but I am in fact screen sharing, so that's why so much memory is being used. If I move my mouse around and drag this window around, since I'm on a screen sharing, it really peaks there.

Yeah, so that's that. Under Show, I can select all processes and a hierarchy of things that started other things. So LaunchD started this, HDTV started this, LaunchD started this, Dock started this—that's pretty cool. My processes—only the processes running is your user, but most of them are administrative processes. They're only root processes; other user processes—active processes.

These are all the processes that are actually doing something. Windhoek processes, which are the processes that will show up when you press Alt + Tab: iChat, ScreenFlow, Finder, and Activity Monitor. Okay, so then you can also do a filter. So if I say I want to search out every... Sorry, I just stop there.

Okay, I can also click this little button to hide the menu bar, but that's old school. So this is an overall view of Activity Monitor. Also, if you go into, there are no preferences. You can go into About just to see the copyrights. Okay, you can also do another—like this menu bar. You can set the update frequency to update more often.

This way, under View of Update Frequency, I can make it update really often, unless off. Now, I'm gonna make it normal, and then the dock icon—I can make it show the application icon. I can make it show the CPU usage. How cool is that? I think that's pretty cool. I think they worked hard on that. I can make it just show the memory. I think that's a nice feature.

There are columns I can select exactly what it shows me: private memory, shared memory, message sent, messages received. I don't really want to go through that. And then I can say to do all the filter stuff. So that—and I can actually print this, but I'm not going to do that.

So that's Activity Monitor for you: a very in-depth discussion of Activity Monitor. Thank you for watching Kids On One. Please subscribe to our videos; it really helps us help us. So just subscribe and help us help you. So, thanks for watching. Matt from Kids On One, signing off.