Intel Mac :: Activity Monitor Does Not Show What Is Reading And Writing And Slowing Down Computer?
Mar 22, 2012
At times my computer runs very slowly. The activity monitor shows a lot of reading and writing, but not what is doing it. Is there any way to tell what is slowing things down?
I have noticed a lot of disk activity reading and writing, it maxes out in bursts up to a couple of minutes at a time and overall seams to be reading and writing a lot of the time, with no processor activity at all. There is no obvious culprits in the activity monitor but terminal displayed large number of read and writes for mds, but spot light is not indexing (no dot in Mag glass) and this has been happening from months now.
Possibly longer noticed it when recieved replacement drive due to crook seagate, may have been doing this but could not hear it. Running last Snow Leopard on iMac 27 mid 2011 i7 custom with 8 gb of ram. also should note this unit has had load of issues Bad Ram, some software problems would not sleep (software) none of which have ever manifested on any of my other (older) macs. Also have noted that this drive activity does seem to coincide with using safari on occasion??
Using SL. I installed iStat and it reports less "wired memory" being used than Activity Monitor. Right now iStat reports: 449MB wired, 515MB active, 364MB inactive and 2.45 GB free. Activity Monitor reports: 706MB wired, 515 MB active, 364MB inactive and 2.45 GB free. Also, our school macs are at a whopping 100MB wired, whereas I'm always above 500MB.
I recently bought a MBP 13" and plan to install windows XP SP2 on it via bootcamp. However, I've just read a few articles online about not being able to write onto the HDD while using windows xp since the partition would be formatted in ntfs? Does that mean I wouldn't even be able to install programs on my windows xp in boot camp??
Well i just bought mac book pro with i7 processor, and my work requires a lot of arabic document reading amd writing i tried pages and word ma the letters are disjoint
I recently purchased a 21.5" Samsung monitor that is connected to my late 2009 13" 2.26GHz 8GB RAM MacBook Pro through a VGA connection with the VGA to Mini DisplayPort adaptor. Since I've started using it, my Internet connection has slowed to a crawl. I've researched the issue online and external monitors can apparently created wireless interference. I'm using a 2011 AirPort Extreme 802.11n/b/g. Is there anything I can do to eliminate this interference?
so, not sure what I did, but recently these little windows pop up that tell me what certain applications are doing. Currently they show up when I change a song in itunes a last.fm window pops up to tell me the song changed, and it also pops up in skype it pops up telling me the other person is typing and when they send there message. It's probably something really dumb that I didn't realize I did, but I can't seem to figure it out.
They are all the last.fm windows covering the screen. They usually don't show up in that mass amount, but I just skipped through itunes so a bunch of them would show up and get the point across
My MBP is a 13 inch and it is less than 6 months old, but recently Safari has been slowing down my whole computer to a snails pace. It is so slow that it takes like 3 minutes for a click to register. It is almost as if it has a virus. I switched to using google chrome and it is almost as if the problem goes away (its still slow with chrome, but a lot faster than safari). Google chrome and google chrome renderer are using 70.9 and 49.9 of my cpu respectively, and my mbp still goes with not near as bad of a problem as safari.
I am on Snow Leopard btw. I have a 1 TB external HD that I'm using with Firewire 400 and I've noticed that it seems to slow down my computer. Like for instance I'll boot up my computer and it will take forever for it to start up. Then, as soon as I turn off my drive it boots up immediately. Or I'll use Spotlight and then basically it gets stuck with a spinning beach ball and as soon as I turn off the drive everything is fast again.
I have a MacBook Pro, running Lion. My laptop seems to have slowed down in terms of opening programs, and often, Finder will get stuck with the spinning ball. I also have an external hard drive attached to the laptop, and accessing the external often brings up the spinning ball.
The external drive has a capacity of 299.72 GB and 191.97 GB is how much is free.
For the laptop, the numbers are 249.07 GB capacity and 184.34 GB free. I regularly run the Disk Utility to check/repair permissions. Is there any way to determine why things are running slow, and/or if I need a new external drive?
I'm not sure if this is cause for concern but it seems like my "free" memory has been really low as of late.
I use Safari and Mail 90% of the time. The other 10% is occasional iTunes use, MPlayer use, and Preview use. Is it time for me to upgrade to 4 GB of RAM?
Note - I do use the following extensions in Safari: AdBlock and YouTube5.
I installed Leopard from an OS disk I purchased to upgrade from Tiger. I just went to launch Activity Monitor and it is not there? I checked Applications and Utilities. From what I read it seems that Leopard should have activity monitor.
So maybe what I am looking for is in the activity monitor, but I just can't find it. I always see people on here posting screen shots of their CPU usage. If they have a quad core machine then there are four columns with blue in it showing the usage. Where can I find this in OS X, or is this a 3rd party program?
Im running SL (updated of course) on my MacBook Pro 4,1. Im fairly new to Macs and to be honest I didnt even know about Activity Monitor till very recently. So I figured I would check out whats going on with my system and fire it up. Activity Monitor does not respond. It starts to open but then sits at this screen with a beach ball...
After a while I usually just Force Quit. Ive ran Onyx recently as well as Disk Repair and everything seems ok.
I'm using Aperture 3.1 for my photo editing, every time I open Aperture my computer starts to slow and cannot even work with Aperture! updated several times but problem persists.
My computer has recently been slowing to a crawl at times, and when I check my Activity Monitor I see the culprit is launchd, which is using 30-60% of my CPU. Anyone else with this problem, and why does it happen? Can I stop it?
A while back I installed an application that allowed me to stream media from my Mac to my PS3, called Gridcast. It didn't work well, so I got rid of it. Since then I have had two processes constantly running, "gridcastd" & "GridCastAlerts." When i select and quit the processes nothing happens, they just continues to run.
According to the screenshot, both Users (green) and System (red) uses 0,19% CPU each. Which means that idle (black) should be around 99%, which it clearly isn't. If I check each process individually, none is using more than 1% of CPU. The screenshot is taken after a reboot and I don't use and third-party background services like VMWare. It's Mac Pro 2.66 Quad (2009).
Noticed a couple of processes in activity monitor I don't think I have seen before. Authorizationhos and ocspd. if they also have them or if they are supposed to be there and what they do?
I've got the activity monitor open in front of me. There are the usual apps I can see, Logic, FF, iTunes, Finder, MS Messenger etc etc. Though there is a lot of other stuff, I don't know what it is (probably system stuff?). For instance there is configd, syslogd, mds, cron most of these have root inb the server column. In the User column for my name I can see mdworker, pboard, launchd and couple of others.
I have recently tried changing the Activity Monitor Icon by using Candybar, for some reason Candybar does not have a Activity monitor in the menu. I have than went to Activity monitor application which is on the desktop and clicked on " show package contents" + "resources" and dragged the original activity monitor icon to a random folder and dragged a new icon into the resources folder. I logged out and logged back in and now the icon did now show up, there is a application icon now.
I have dragged the new icon out and put the old one back in the folder to see if it would go back to its original icon and now it does not go back to how it was in the first place, so pretty much no icon exists but only a application icon shows but the program does open up. Another thing I dont understand is why I could not see a Activity Monitor Icon in the CandyBar program, I am not sure how to change the Icon or how people change it or why they have modified activity monitor icons is you cant change it.
The computer, Mac 10.4 Tiger, sent a message that my Startup drive is almost full. I tried to do the best to make more space available and inadvertently must have done something to the files of the Activity monitor. The next morning when I turned the computer on, it went up in smoke, i.e., disappeared and cannot be found in 'applications'.
Do I have to reinstall? Can I reinstall just for the Activity Monitor or ?
on Activity Monitor, why am i seeing two CVMCompiler?under kind, one of them says "Intel(64 bit)"and the other one just says "Intel" and i am only seeing one CVMCompiler on my other computer?
I keep hearing about this Malware so I went on the Apple site and got the directions for removing it. It suggested looking for MacDefender or MacSecurity. I didn't have anything like that in my Activity Monitor. Can I assume my computer was never affec
I've made two coasters today on my iMac 27" core i7.
I am using Verbatim DVD +R DL blanks and utilized Disk Utility to make one coaster (copy to a .CDR and then burned) and then used Toast 10 to write IFO files.
The DVD will "run" but looks and sounds like a satellite tv signal in bad weather - choppy all over the place. This happens on 4 players - two separate laptops, an xbox 360, and even the original iMac 27" I used to write the DVDs.
I have had no problems whatsoever writing single layer DVDs (even using old Comp USA blanks!) and playing them on aforementioned players.
Anybody have any success writing DL DVDs? If so, what brand of disc did you use? Did you reduce speed to 2x writing? Help - I don't want to create any more coasters!
A few day ago I startup up my iMac and only a folder with a question mark was shown in the screen.
I boot from the Lion DVD, run disk utility but the only drive I get was the DVD and disk1/Mac OS X Base System.
I turned off the computer and next morning I turned on agian and this time with no problems, I use it for a few days with no problems but yesterday it happens again...
I do run disk utility again onlu turn it off, and this morning I tried to turn it on again, but the same foder appears...I run disk utility (get the DVD and disk1) and turn it off for a few hours.
What I should do ? Is there any 3rd party tools that I can try do use to solve this issue ?
PS: when the iMac started up with no problems I run disk utility and made a repair disk to the mac HD...
I leave the Acitvity Monitor running all the time with my CPU Usage as the dock icon. I like to see the cores working away. On my Quad MacPro at work I have four blue bars, on my old iMac C2D, MacBook etc. I have two bars. On my new i7 QC iMac I am only getting one bar. Any body have any thoughts on why this is? Has Apple changed the way the icon shows cores? Here is a link to a photo of my current dock on my i7. Current Dock Icon on i7 Quad Core