The Network tab shows information about how your Mac is uploading and downloading network data. It also shows if it’s a 32- or 64-bit process. The Disk tab shows the amount of data that a process has read from and written back to your hard drive. The preventing sleep tab shows if an app is actually preventing the Mac from going to sleep on its normal schedule. App nap-enabled apps consume very little energy when they aren’t in the foreground. This section shows which apps support it. App nap is a relatively new feature to OS X. The average impact tab is a measure of the impact over the past 8 hours (or since startup if it’s been less than 8 hours). The impact tab is a measure of how a process is affecting energy consumption. The Energy tab is extremely useful for laptop users. Swap used is the space on your hard drive used by the Mac’s memory management process. Virtual memory is the amount of memory-address space that is being allocated for memory mapping. Memory used is the amount currently being used at the current time. Physical memory is the amount of RAM your Mac actually has installed. Toward the bottom, there’s a box with Physical Memory, Memory Used, Virtual Memory and Swap Used. As with the CPU tab, you can sort by many different options. The Memory section shows information about how your RAM is being used. You can sort by % to see which app is eating up the most of the processor capacity. I find that the % CPU section is the most helpful. If your fan is spinning on your Mac for no apparent reason, this is the section that you want to investigate. CPUĬPU shows how the processes are affecting the processor. The app is broken up into five different tabs: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, and Network. You can find the app inside the Applications/Utilities folder. This allows you to see how different programs and processes affect your Mac’s performance. But if the behavior persists, here’s a bit more information.The Mac’s Activity Monitor shows what is running on your Mac at any given time. Restarting your Mac is the only way to restart your kernel, and sometimes that will solve all problems. Unused memory is wasted memory, so kernel_task will put it to work for things like caching files, and running a modern operating system means sometimes using some CPU power.īut if kernel_task is constantly using a majority of your system resources, and your Mac is really slow, you might have a problem. If you’re computer isn’t running slowly, don’t worry about this process taking up a lot of memory or occasionally using up CPU cycles: that’s normal. RELATED: Why It's Good That Your Computer's RAM Is Full Activity Monitor puts all of this varied activity under one banner: kernel_task. When your turn on your Mac, the kernel is the first thing that starts, and basically everything you do on your computer flows through the kernel at some point. This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in Activity Monitor, like hidd, mdsworker, installd, and many others. Don’t know what those services are? Better start reading!Ī “kernel,” if you didn’t know, is at the core of any operating system, sitting between your CPU, memory, and other hardware and the software that you run. RELATED: What Is This Process and Why Is It Running on My Mac? So you found something called “kernel_task” in Activity Monitor, and you want to know what it is.
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