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> I now keep Activity Monitor open while I work I also do this, but I wonder is it a bad idea? Is Activity Monitor enabling any extra logging that itself is sl

> I now keep Activity Monitor open while I work I also do this, but I wonder is it a bad idea? Is Activity Monitor enabling any extra logging that itself is slowing things down further, or is it just subscribing to already enabled events? I'm on M1 MBA 16GB and I get the out-of-memory errors too. It's still a world of difference from the 2016 MBP I upgraded from. As touched on in another comment, the problem might be the 8 desktops and 20 Firefox windows I keep open.

noduerme 5y ago
I've always tried to avoid keeping Activity Monitor open. On my current 2015 MBA, it doesn't eat up a lot of memory, but it usually does list itself as a top consumer of CPU cycles, often 15-20%. Running `top` in the terminal only eats about 2%. It would be ironic if Activity Monitor itself were causing a memory leak.
- userbinator 5y ago
  I'm a long-time Windows user and it's customary to keep Task Manager open (more for its tray icon) to keep an eye on what the system is doing. Is that not common in the Mac world?
  - novok 5y ago
    We have apps like istat menus that behave similarly. Activity Monitor doesn't create a menubar icon that lets you monitor system state like the windows equivalent, but it's dock/taskbar icon can be set to behave the same. I also think windows task manager is fairly efficient and TBH more useful with their full system state graph view. You have to click one resource at a time to see system state of your memory, cpu, etc and there is no GPU graph like windows.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    Opening it from time to time, sure, keeping it open, no. Power users may install a menu bar applet to track the stuff but you generally don't need to bother.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Honestly unless something seems to be sweating the box there's not a great reason to monitor it all the time. By far the biggest CPU/memory culprits are web pages, but just looking at a bunch of chrome or ff processes doesn't really help determine which it is. Activity Monitor's own GUI is a pretty serious offender, running around trying to allocate icons and graphs for all those apps. If you just need to know what's going on, `top` on the command line will watch it for you. But usually (from a 2015 mac perspective) there's no need to keep an eye on it.

noduerme 5y ago

I've always tried to avoid keeping Activity Monitor open. On my current 2015 MBA, it doesn't eat up a lot of memory, but it usually does list itself as a top consumer of CPU cycles, often 15-20%. Running `top` in the terminal only eats about 2%. It would be ironic if Activity Monitor itself were causing a memory leak.

userbinator 5y ago
I'm a long-time Windows user and it's customary to keep Task Manager open (more for its tray icon) to keep an eye on what the system is doing. Is that not common in the Mac world?
- novok 5y ago
  We have apps like istat menus that behave similarly. Activity Monitor doesn't create a menubar icon that lets you monitor system state like the windows equivalent, but it's dock/taskbar icon can be set to behave the same. I also think windows task manager is fairly efficient and TBH more useful with their full system state graph view. You have to click one resource at a time to see system state of your memory, cpu, etc and there is no GPU graph like windows.
- mlindner 5y ago
  Opening it from time to time, sure, keeping it open, no. Power users may install a menu bar applet to track the stuff but you generally don't need to bother.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Honestly unless something seems to be sweating the box there's not a great reason to monitor it all the time. By far the biggest CPU/memory culprits are web pages, but just looking at a bunch of chrome or ff processes doesn't really help determine which it is. Activity Monitor's own GUI is a pretty serious offender, running around trying to allocate icons and graphs for all those apps. If you just need to know what's going on, `top` on the command line will watch it for you. But usually (from a 2015 mac perspective) there's no need to keep an eye on it.