OS X :: App To Monitor What Process Causing Disk Activity?
Mar 21, 2010
I just bought an iMac 27" 4 cores, the one with the Intel i5. Sadly, this computer feels like my first iMac in terms of speed - it is sluggish and the reason for this is that the hard drive is being thrashed excessively. By using iStat Menus, I can clearly see that the disk is being constantly read, constantly at 3 MB/s, which is insane since I am not copying anything: I thought the culprit was Spotlight, so I turned off indexing on my main HD and the problem still persists. I cannot find one utility out there that will let me know what process is beating the crap out of my hard drive. Is there such thing for OS X? Something like Windows 7 resource monitor is exactly what I am looking for.
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.
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 just found a 'hidden' process running in Activity Monitor. If it weren't for the indication of 64 bit under virtual memory, I wouldn't have noticed anything. This is the first time that I've ever seen a 64 bit process running with root privileges. On top of that, it's hidden. Whenever I try to quit or even force quit it, it comes back. Should I be concerned? I'm little worried right now. This wouldn't have any relation to the sudden loss of several fonts that occurred a few days ago, would it? (I lost Century Gothic)
On a new (June 2012) MacBook Pro running OSX 10.7.4 I am seeing a process called "unzip" in the Activity Monitor. It pops about every 5 seconds and is using anywhere from 5%-35% of the CPU and then goes away, then comes right back.I am having some system performance issues and I am wondering if this is the culprit.
I'm running 10.5.8 on a 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. The machine often slows down dramatically and i can hear the internal drive going like crazy. When I look in Activity Monitor however there's nothing chewing up much CPU. I can see that there's a lot of disk activity going on however. Unfortunately I don't see anyway in activity monitor to see what processes are accessing the hard drive. Does anyone know of a way to track down what processes are accessing the disk?
Had my Itunes hacked today and was just looking through my activity monitor for key-loggers and I found "Isboxd" which I can't find online so I just wanted to see what it was just in case before I deleted it.
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I am wondering if anyone knows of a good osx based alternative to Process Explorer on windows - what I'd like to be able to do is graph CPU and memory for a specific process and ideally see what network connections a specific process has open. atMonitor seems to do this pretty well generally, but not for specific processes (this is for monitoring a multiplayer flash game).
I have a late 2007 MacBook running OS X 10.5.8 that I upgraded with a Hitachi 200GB 7200RPM drive not long after I purchased it. It's been working great until about a week ago when I noticed a very quiet and frequent clicking/whirring sound coming from the drive as I was using it. My first reaction was that it might be the "click of death," but I wasn't getting any errors or having issues booting the machine, and the clicking was very periodic and not sudden like a drive crash. I verified the disk using Disk Utility and it checks out. I then opened up Activity Monitor and started watching the Disk Activity and sure enough I see a big red spike in I/O Data Written every time I hear the clicking sound, which is about every 20 seconds or so. Is my drive actually dying a slow, clicking death, or is there a rogue process writing to the disk and causing the sound? Is there a way to find out what it is?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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
repeated disk access in my 2010 Mac Pro, even when it's otherwise idle. Activity Monitor shows no unusual processes, and I've disabled Spotlight indexing.
I just woke up my MacBook Pro, and the HD sounded like there was something going on. It wasn't the indexing, so I opened up Activity Monitor and found something taking 10-30% CPU called "find". It was under several instances of "sh", and I think it's first parent was "locate.code" or something like that. Anyway, after a while I opened Activity Monitor again, and the "find" process was replaced by something called "makewhatis". It disappeared almost a second after I opened Activity Monitor. Obviously it's just part of the system, but what exactly do these processes do?
I was checking out my Activity Monitor the other day and I have noticed this before. I have 4GB in my MacBook Pro and updated to SL and now AM is only showing that I have 3.75GB. I figured maybe it was just an error and I have shut my MBP off and it still hasn't changed.
Is there a way to gather all the information that we can find in the Activity Monitor (cpu, memory, open file-descriptors for each process) via the Terminal? In fact, I am looking for a procfs (/proc) equivalent.
I have a 2.66 quad core 2009 Mac Pro. Running 10.6.2. I see weird behavior in the Activity Monitor. The "% idle" number jumps from 49% to 61% to 99% (but usually stays around 49%), when I'm actually 99% idle. The "% user" and "% system" just don't add up to "% idle." Does anyone else see this? I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the RAM I just installed, or if this is a coincidence.
