Activity Monitor OS X Guide

Within the Activity monitor, you can monitor your computer's processor, hard disk memory and network activity. The Activity monitor will give you in the form of a graph or in numbers which applications take up your Mac's power and shows you exactly how much.

While the Activity monitor is open, you can have details given to you directly from the dock icon. You can have a graph giving you CPU usage, network activity, disk usage and memory usage. This can be particularly useful when monitoring an application while it's running.

Understanding memory usage

Are you wondering if you need more memory? Here is a little guide to better understand how to read your memory usage in OS X 10.5 Leopard. There are 4 categories in reading memory usage: Wired, Active, Inactive and Free. Here is a brief description of each:

• Wired: This amount will vary with the number of applications you have opened. This memory cannot be cached to the disk. It's locked as RAM.

• Active: This memory is currently in RAM and is currently being used.
• Inactive: This memory is cached to the disk but is not being used. Its waiting for an application to use it. Having a good amount of memory here is a good thing.
• Free: This memory is currently not being used.

If you have a very low amount of "Free" RAM, don't worry. Memory is being used than becomes "Inactive" If you often have a low Inactive and Free memory, this is when your computer need more memory. You can test this when you are using all the applications you need at once. If you have a pretty high amount of inactive memory, you have enough memory.