Does it seem like your Mac is running slowly? It’s always possible that you need more RAM, a speedy SSD to replace a slow hard drive, or even a new Mac. But you might just have a rogue app that’s hogging your Mac’s CPU. Here’s how to figure out if that’s the problem.

The key is a utility app called Activity Monitor that Apple bundles with every Mac. Open your Applications folder and scroll down until you see the Utilities folder. Open that to find and double-click Activity Monitor.

But if my Mac’s going too slow, and I see, say, iTunes is up there gobbling up 90 percent or more of my CPU, I’ll gladly shut the app down to see if that improves things in a hurry. 11 Best apps to speed up or slow down the music People who listen to audiobooks or prefer to take up podcasts on the road, know about such a situation as uncomfortable rhythm. Your audio track may be too slow or too fast – in general, such that you will feel really uncomfortable listening to the information. Startup is slowing you down. When you start your Mac, a lot of things get loaded in the background. Not only do they slow down your Mac on startup, but they continue to use up resources the whole time you’re using your Mac. How to fix it: Manage your Startup Items. Give your Mac a clean start and make OS X run faster. A slow internet connection with no real reason behind the slow speed is a far bigger problem. Fortunately, there is a very easy way to find out what is dragging your internet down through the Task Manager. Open Task Manager and sort all active apps and service by network usage. To do so, simply click the ‘Network’ tab. Leaving an external hard drive, SD card or even a printer plugged in at startup will slow down the process. Finally, make sure you are still using good computer habits. Keep your hard drive clean, and give your Mac a check up occasionally by looking at the system report.

Activity Monitor can seem daunting because it lists every “process” running on your Mac. In many cases, a process is the same as what you think of as an app, so you’ll see processes for apps like Mail and Safari. However, some apps use multiple processes, and macOS itself relies on a ton of processes too.

What Apps Are Slowing Down My Computer

Notice the buttons at the top of Activity Monitor that provide access to different views: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, and Network. Those views show the impact each process has on those aspects of the Mac. For now, we’ll focus on the CPU view that’s the default, but if you were trying to figure out why your MacBook Pro’s battery was draining so quickly, you’d look in the Energy view.

At the bottom of the CPU view is a graph of CPU load, and numbers that correspond to how much of that load comes from the system and how much from the user (apps you’ve launched). As long as the sum of those numbers stays under 100% most of the time, you’re probably fine. But if you’re near or at 100%, you’ll want to hunt for rogue processes.

What apps are slowing down my macbook pro

To identify them, click the % CPU column header to sort the process list by CPU power. If necessary, click again to change the direction of the sort so the arrow next to % CPU is pointing down, so those processes using the most CPU power are at the top. Be aware that the percentages in this column are by core (unlike the graph and numbers at the bottom), so a runaway app on a 4-core iMac could claim to be using as much as 400% in the % CPU column.

Now watch the list for a while. If one process is sucking CPU power, you’ll see it at the top of the list. If it matches an app you’ve launched, quit that app to give other apps a chance at the CPU. That often solves your problem quickly. In the most extreme case, the process name will be in red, which means it’s not responding, at which point you can force quit it by selecting it and then clicking the X button at the left of Activity Monitor’s toolbar.

Equally likely, though, is that the top process will be one you don’t recognize immediately, like backupd (Time Machine), mds or mdworker (Spotlight), photolibraryd or photoanalysisd (Photos), or kernel_task or WindowServer (core macOS functionality). You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) quit those processes manually, but at least you’ll know that things are slow due to a Time Machine backup running, Spotlight indexing new files, or Photos analyzing the images in your library. If one of these processes has gone nuts, the best solution is to restart your Mac.

What Apps Are Slowing Down My Pc

If you can’t identify a single rogue app, or if the slowdown doesn’t seem to be related to any app, you can learn more about how to resolve performance problems in the ebook Speeding Up Your Mac: A Joe On Tech Guide. Or, of course, get in touch, and we’ll see if we can suggest software fixes or new hardware that will help.

What Apps Are Slowing Down My Mac