KILLING Mac OS
If you’re the sort who likes to keep on top of the apps running on your system, then you’ve probably already encountered those stubborn processes that, despite quitting the application, keep behind-the-scenes core or periphery application processes running in the background, consuming processing power and draining your battery. Or, out of the blue, the Mac slows down because one of these processes start to run, suddenly eating up 100% of the CPU. Ending this process will improve the overall performance of the computer, especially in systems with less RAM.
Then there are things like removable media and mounted disk images, where processes hidden from plain view could well prevent the media from safely ejecting. This is a situation that no doubt everyone has encountered at least a few times…
How to play bingo in vegas. Is Apple killing Mac gaming? Believe it or not, this is a question developers and gamers seriously ask themselves every few months. Chamber traveler mac os. This concern gained momentum when Apple announced, during 2018’s WWDC, that OpenGL would be deprecated. How to force an app to quit on your Mac If an app on your Mac stops responding and you can't quit the app normally, use Force Quit to close the app. To quit (close) a Mac app normally, choose Quit from the app's menu in the menu bar, or press Command (⌘)-Q.
If your Mac is using an earlier version of any Mac operating system, you should install the latest Apple software updates, which can include important security updates and updates for the apps that are installed by macOS, such as Safari, Books, Messages, Mail, Music, Calendar, and Photos. MacOS Latest version; macOS Big Sur. I want to play video poker. Kill problematic processes. When you identify a process that's causing a problem, either because it's hogging lots of CPU cycles or memory, or because it's highlighted in the Activity Monitor as having crashed, you need to kill it. To do that, click on the process.
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How to View Processes
There are various ways to view running apps and processes in macOS: looking at the Dock, opening the Force Quit Applications window, using the Terminal, and finally by checking Activity Monitor. Also, certain third party Mac monitoring apps, such as iStat Menus, can allow you to view the processes by clicking on the CPU icon in the menu bar.
Activity Monitor, the built-in system monitoring utility, is the best way to view all processes currently running on the Mac, and from here manage them based on how they affect the computer's performance. Using the ‘view’ menu allows users to choose which processes are shown in each of the five categories, be that all processes hierarchically, user processes, system processes, active processes, and more.
The Most Common Processes Mac Users Complain About
Spotlight
At the core of every search performed on a Mac is Spotlight. Whenever you search for a file, it is Spotlight that will locate it for you, because it indexes the contents of the computer. Think of situations such as migrating to a new Mac, after a complete system erase and new install, a major macOS upgrade, and the like. In these cases Spotlight will consume a lot of your computer's computing power. There are situations where it's not important to have a fully indexed Mac, and at these times it makes sense to disable Spotlight to save resources.
Faces, Memories, Photos
Indexing faces and objects was promoted by Apple as one of the key features of the Photos app and macOS Sierra. While in theory it is a nice feature, in actual fact it became a source of frustration because users couldn't understand why it took so long to index the photo library. Some users had huge photo libraries, others smaller, but the result was the same slow indexing process. According to Apple support, the ‘feature’ has a daily limit on the number of photos it is able to process.
That’s the photoanalysisd process, which sometimes launches and demands CPU resources. As a result, what you'll notice is a slow Mac that can become hot if the process takes too long to run.
Killing Moss With Salt
What Processes to Kill With Activity Monitor
When you open Activity Monitor, a long list of items appears. When looking at the process names, the vast majority of them may sound like gibberish to you, and you'll be tempted to kill all of them. That won’t always be such a good idea, though, so it is important to ask yourself: ‘Which processes do I need to kill?’
- Look for processes with names similar to those of closed apps. It's safe to quit processes that resemble app names you have already quit.
- Close Rosetta applications. These are PowerPC processes running on an Intel-based Mac, so it doesn't make too much sense to allow them to eat into the physical resources of your Mac.
- Quit disk image processes. Sometimes the only way to unmount a stubborn disk image is by killing the associated disk image process.
- Quit processes using high amounts of CPU. In the CPU tab click on the arrow until it is facing downwards. This will help you identify the processes that are demanding high CPU resources.
- Kill all duplicate processes by clicking on the Process Name tab to view the processes in alphabetical order, and quit any secondary items with the exact same name.
Please note that there are some processes that shouldn’t be messed with, especially those run by the root user. If you are not certain what a process means, it is better to ask for help from someone who does or contact Apple support.
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pkill sshwill attempt to kill every process with the text string 'ssh' in it, including not only ssh-sessions, but also ssh daemons and your ssh-agent. Which is why this script should never be run as superuser (I could find a lot worse examples than with ssh above).. Personally, i prefer double checking processes before i kill them. Look them up with ps and kill them with kill, slightly inconvenient, but safe
yeah, gotta agree with kal, this is an extremely bad practice. one needs to know the potential effect of blindly running this kind of operation.
Why not use the '-w' flag for grep to match on a whole word?
Killing Moss Lawn
ditto
Mac Os Catalina
I found this command immediately after submitting this script. doh.
Killing Moss Trees
live and learn - we all do
**this is not a flame it's meant to be constructive critisim**
at the least you should not be matching things like ssh-agent if you choose ssh with this script. that is just wrong. sorry! because if you do that you can trigger all sorts of problems killing processes that you did not intend to kill..
this script is a duplication of functionality and while it is intersting and duplication of functionality is kinda what open source is all about this script is just dangerous!!!!
granted that the danger is minmal, esp if the script is not run as the superuser.. there is little you can do, but throwing around kill's arbitrarily will screw things up!
for example i have both inetd and xinetd running here for some reason??? anyone know why??? and if i ran your script with 'inetd' it would kill inetd && xinetd that's just wrong.. especially when there are better tools on the system that will do the job properly 'killall' ????
i'm not trying to be rude at all but.. at least do exact process name matching.
Killing Mac Os Sierra
a modification for pidof to kill..
the default is to send a sighup but you can kill too
ie ./kill name sig
place this script somewhere and chmod it 755
it's the perl version so the matching is better!
the base for this code came from someone who submitted a perl version as a comment to my bash&tr&awk pidof script, i forget his name but just want to make people know it's not entirely my own. but heavily modified.
<code>
#!/usr/bin/perl
$search=$ARGV[0];
if ($ARGV[1]) {$sig=$ARGV[1]; } else { $sig=1; }
@procs = `ps -cxa`;
for $proc (@procs ) {
if( $proc =~ /s+(d+)s+S+s+S+s+S+s+(S+)/ ) {
$pid = $1;
$name = $2;
if( $name =~ /^$search$/ ) {
kill $sig,$pid;
print '$pid ';
}
}
}
print 'n';
</code>