02-05-2017, 06:06 AM
Open Activity Monitor.
Select All Processes from the View menu, if not already selected.
Look for anything using more than 10% of your CPU.
As an example on my dual core i7 NUC (think: Hack Mini), this web page in Safari is taking less than 2% cpu while I'm typing and everything else is taking less than that (no major programs running, just OS processes and a number of shareware utilities). All well-behaved.
You may see a process taking up a lot of CPU (I get powerd up to 99% on occasion, this is an Apple bug). And some web pages stink. Tom's Hardware uses 99% of CPU in Safari and FFox for me just doing nothing after everything has loaded so something's broken there. That'll kill your laptop battery, if nothing else.
Now to your disk.
Click the Disk tab in Activity Monitor.
In the graph in the bottom, click IO and select Data.
Right click anywhere in the header where it says Process Name or Bytes Written and select %CPU
Drag %CPU to the right of Process Name
Now you can view what's happening to your disk and CPU at the same time because the problem will probably be traceable using one of these 2 things. Your disk shouldn't be doing much unless you are copying files around or using an app like Photoshop, which uses the disk as a cache.
A laptop HDD in a Mac Mini tops out at 100MB/sec on optimal transfers but can do 20-40MB/sec regularly. If you see a lot of that, then something is doing things in the background, look at the Bytes Written and Bytes Read totals to see what's doing that.
Conversely, when you do something on your computer and it's not responding properly, see if there's any data being transferred to or from the disk. If you're opening a program and the disk is sitting there doing nothing for a while, like 50 KB/sec or even just 1 MB/sec, the problem is the disk.
Select All Processes from the View menu, if not already selected.
Look for anything using more than 10% of your CPU.
As an example on my dual core i7 NUC (think: Hack Mini), this web page in Safari is taking less than 2% cpu while I'm typing and everything else is taking less than that (no major programs running, just OS processes and a number of shareware utilities). All well-behaved.
You may see a process taking up a lot of CPU (I get powerd up to 99% on occasion, this is an Apple bug). And some web pages stink. Tom's Hardware uses 99% of CPU in Safari and FFox for me just doing nothing after everything has loaded so something's broken there. That'll kill your laptop battery, if nothing else.
Now to your disk.
Click the Disk tab in Activity Monitor.
In the graph in the bottom, click IO and select Data.
Right click anywhere in the header where it says Process Name or Bytes Written and select %CPU
Drag %CPU to the right of Process Name
Now you can view what's happening to your disk and CPU at the same time because the problem will probably be traceable using one of these 2 things. Your disk shouldn't be doing much unless you are copying files around or using an app like Photoshop, which uses the disk as a cache.
A laptop HDD in a Mac Mini tops out at 100MB/sec on optimal transfers but can do 20-40MB/sec regularly. If you see a lot of that, then something is doing things in the background, look at the Bytes Written and Bytes Read totals to see what's doing that.
Conversely, when you do something on your computer and it's not responding properly, see if there's any data being transferred to or from the disk. If you're opening a program and the disk is sitting there doing nothing for a while, like 50 KB/sec or even just 1 MB/sec, the problem is the disk.