How to make Activity Monitor show me useful information?

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dave k.dave k.
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014


Why is it when I get a spinning wheel of death (or spinning beach ball), my activity monitor icon shows zero increased activity across any of the categories (CPU, System Memory, Disk Activity, etc.) while its happening?  


 


What exactly is going on with AM?  I have a i5 MBP running 10.8.4 with 4 GB of RAM (yes I know I should add more RAM), but why doesn't Activity Monitor actually tell me anything while that stupid beach ball is spinning around and around?  No applications are hanging up, I have flash blockers installed  (ad block), and I don't use Java...


 


Under Activity Monitor --> View --> Columns there are quite a few hidden columns.  Would any of these be useful?


 


Thanks in advance.


 


Dave

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member


    I use terminal commands for such things;


     


    # ps -aux | less


     


    or


     


    # top


     


    To kill a runaway process use;


     


    # kill -9 [process id]

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  • Reply 2 of 2
    Marvinmarvin Posts: 15,585moderator
    dave k. wrote: »
    Why is it when I get a spinning wheel of death (or spinning beach ball), my activity monitor icon shows zero increased activity across any of the categories (CPU, System Memory, Disk Activity, etc.) while its happening?

    Running out of memory can cause this but hard drives can do this too, especially if they are failing. Check your page out amount to see if you are running out of memory.

    A good minimum for beachball-less operation is an SSD and 8GB of RAM.
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