shownotes_MCM20110326

Activity Monitor
  Provides a GUI for all the activity that is happening on your Mac.
    Processors
    Memory
    Disk Activity
    Disk Usage
    Network Activity
  You'll find it in Applications/Utilities
The main window. Processes
  Can control which columns are displayed under the View-->Columns menu
  Can use the 'Show' drop down to filter view to:
    All processes
    Your processes
    System processes
    Other user processes
    Active and Inactive
    Windowed processes (basically apps)
  Process ID - An incrementing number of each process running on your machine
    This can be apps, utilities, daemons, or other background processes
    Sorting the column will let you see the first or latest processes
  Process Name
  User column
    Displays the user that launched the process
    Typically your user, root, or something like daemon, _www
  CPU %
    How much of the CPu an app is actively using.
    Seeing it spike to 100% or higher shouldn't be a concern, especially if the app is actively doing a task.
  Threads
    A sequence of instructions being performed by one application or process.
    If you see an app with lots of threads running, and it doesn't have a UI on screen it could be running background stuff
  Memory
    Real - Physical memory on the machine
    Virtual = "fake memory", swap disk.
  Other columns:
    CPU Time, # Ports, Private Memory, Shared Memory, Messages Sent, and Messages Received.
Tabs along the bottom
  CPU
    Can see what percentage of the processor is in use by User or System processes
    Also total threads and processes
  Memory
    Free Memory: RAM that's not being used.
    Wired: Can't be moved to disk. Stays in physical RAM
    Active: currently in memory, and has been recently used.
    Inactive: Memory is not actively being used, but was recently used.
    VM size has nothing to do with hard disk space or with the amount of ram being used.
      Is simply number of addresses allocated to a program. VM Size is the totally of the addresses allocated for all apps, so can exceed the size of your hard drive.
    Used: Total used
      Page Ins/Outs
        Memory moved between RAM and the hard disk.
        Generally want page outs to be low
      Swap Used
        Amount of information copied to the swap file on your hard drive.
        Again the lower the better
      If either are consistently high, get more RAM
      You can reboot to reset and then watch.
  Disk Activity
    Read and writes to the HD
    Throughput can be measured
    There is a graph
  Disk Usage
    Amount of HD in use or free.
    Can read internal and external drives
  Network
    Packets in and out and their throughput
    Total data sent and received and throughput
    May be useful in identifying background network activity
Advanced stuff
  Inspect
    Like "Get Info" on a process
    Parent process that launched it.
    User
    Threads, PU time, Page Ins
    Memory details
    CPU info
  Show delta
    process will turn green in list
    Will monitor the changes in all the parameters between frequency updates
      Change sample frequency in View-->Update Frequency
      0.5 sec, 1 sec, 2 sec, 5 sec.
  Quit Process - Kill a process.
    Application not responding
    Sometimes sending an Interrupt can "wake" a non-responsive process
      View-->Send Signal to process
        SIGKILL - Kill immediately
        SIGINT - Interrupt
        SIGHUP - Hang up
        SIGQUIT - Quit and dump core
  Live monitoring
    View-->Dock Icon
      CPU, Network, Disk, Memory
    Windows
      CPU Usage
      CPU History
    Of course also great 3rd party tools like iStat