The Macintosh, as elegant and intuitive as the design is, is not completely without problems. From time to time, you will come up with performance issues whose source you can never quite be sure of. In the past, if your Mac did anything weird, you’d never suspect a virus. These days though, things are different. Viruses are a distinct possibility. Whether or not you have the best antivirus for Mac installed on your computer, it can always be a great convenience, in the event of a slowdown or another issue, to have the tools you need to look under the hood.

The issue could be a very simple one – an application that’s malfunctioning and hogging processor power or memory or some minor part of the program that’s frozen up. When anything like this happens, you typically have one of two options – the Command Line and the Activity Monitor.

Let’s start with the Activity Monitor – mostly because it’s currently user-friendly

On OS X, the Activity Monitor is an inbuilt app that can graphically show you everything that’s going on in your computer. You get to see what every application process is doing, how much memory and CPU power it’s taking up, and so on. To get to Activity Monitor, you need to go to Applications, to the Utilities Folder and then to the app itself. Once you open it, right away it shows you a list of all the process IDs, all the names of the processes. You can also see who’s using them and the number of threads they are using, and everything else.

Most of the time, people will sort the list for CPU and memory usage percentage. Once you make sure that you’ve selected All Processes in the drop-down menu, these two pieces of statistics will be the most useful ones to turn to, to identify an errant operation.

Once you have identified by name the process that seems to be the source of the trouble, you can double-click it for more information and a separate window. You’ll get very detailed information about the number of threads and ports used, the virtual memory in use, and so on. Another way of arriving here would be to use the Inspect button. If you would like to end the process because it’s frozen up or something, you just need to click on Quit Process.

To hard-core Mac users though, Activity Monitor isn’t the real deal

To them, the command line is where all the action is. And the top and ps commands are the most useful ones.

The top command, when you use it, will make for you a list of all the processes that seem to be hogging the most resources at the moment. You just need to open a terminal console and type in top. That makes it a lot easier, doesn’t it – to not have to sort through the list and have just what you’re interested in displayed by default?

If you need more specific information – in-depth stuff, as it were – the process status command is what you’re looking for. With this you get some pretty specific information that on Windows you get with the tasklist instruction. For instance, if in the terminal window, you typed in ps –u and then you added your username after that, the computer would tell you what processor cores were in use for you. Typing in ps –p and the process ID number after that would tell you a lot about what was going on with that particular process.

Whether or not you have the best antivirus for Mac installed, these functions can give you a good deal of control over how your computer performs. And that’s really what you’re interested in, isn’t it?

Try Mac Update for all kinds of interesting ideas on Mac software to use.