Osx process monitor6/29/2023 This is a running tally of the amount of time the CPU has spent on running the process. When a process is programmed inefficiently, or has bugs in the code logic, the amount of CPU used can skyrocket and hog computing resources from other applications. This will only happen for processes that are multi-processor aware, and others will maximize at 100% but the system will divide their work among the various processors. This is the percentage of the overall processing power in the system being used by the process, and is relative to one CPU core, so many times in multiprocessor systems you will see a process take up 150% of the CPU, which indicates in a 2-core system that 75% of the total CPU power is being used by that process. There are ways to temporarily promote a user to "root" in order to manage other processes, but we will not discuss that here. The root user technically owns "everything" in the system, but system users by default can only directly control the subset of processes that they own. When the system boots up, the initial "launchd" process is started under the "root" user, and subsequent processes launched under this "launchd" umbrella are owned by this same user. This is the owner of the process, or the active user under which the process was started. The ones with abbreviated names such as "ntpd" or "hidd" are background processes that provide system support but for the most part aren't directly managed by the user. The process name is the common name for the application, such as "Mail", or "Finder". ![]() Every process is associated with its own Process ID, the Process ID of it's "parent" process, and the process group of which it is a member (generally the "parent" process). Progressively higher-level system processes are given PIDs up to approximately 200, with processes starting from user accounts being given higher process numbers. For instance, the kernel is given number 0, followed by 1 for the parent "launchd" process. ![]() Processes can technically be given any number that is not in use however, the system will use number ranges to separate different processes by levels of importance. Whenever processes are started in OS X, they are given a unique identifier number, which can be used to identify it for recognition by other commands (for example, the "kill" utility that terminates processes). We will go through them one-by-one to go over what they do: In order to view them, you can check them by going to the "View" menu and checking the options in the "Columns" menus. The process list shows various attributes about the running processes, many of which are not viewable by default. ![]() For instance, you can see in this view that all processes in the system are children of the root launchd "parent", which is the first "userland" process started in the system kernel upon booting (see our previous article on OS X system process organization). Since processes in OS X can launch other ones, this will show which ones are the respective parents and children of each other. One final option for viewing the processes is to see them "heirarchically", which is available in the drop-down menu next to the filter box. In addition, you can use the "Filter" search bar to find a given task by name (only names are searchable). You can limit this to showing only user processes, or only system processes, active processes, or inactive ones, etc., which can be convenient for isolating specific tasks. This is where you view and manage all processes in the system.
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