know thy mac

M

Magnus Maximus

Registered
Here's a cool way study how your mac thinks, with the help of the command line.

First, open "CPU Monitor", set it aside in your dock, let it flow at basal thought levels.

Then, open "Terminal", expand the window size, and type:

top -u -s 0.1 10

... and watch your mac max out the CPU, as you study it's behavior.



note:
the -u flag arranges your top processes in terms of %CPU used.

the -s 0.1 asks it to update "top" every 0.1 seconds.

10 asks it to list 10 processes


... watch your mac trying to make up its mind...
 
Interesting.
But for me this is not true

... and watch your mac max out the CPU, as you study it's behavior.

It did not max out the cpu

Here is my stats

G4 400Mhz MP. 384mb ram. OS X 10.0.3.
It did only use about 50% of the processors.

The only y I have been able to really max out the Cpu are when I rendered a picture in 4D Cinema demo. It was nice to watch my computer really squeeze everything from the processors. Then I also tried open applications and listen to mp3 while it was rendering. Noo Problems. :)

One thing. What is de difference whit red and green staples in the CPU monitor. now while the terminal is doing the top command (while i write this) its almost all red. When I was rendering in 4D cinema almost everything was green.
 
Ok I thing i get it. the red dots are system memory usage and the green user memory usage.

I tried running the top command in 2 shells. now system memory usage is about 80% and user memory usage about 15%

Now I am running the top command in 10 shells. rendering a clip in IMovie. Listening to radio from I-tunes. Writing this in Omniweb.
The system is still usable :)
Try to do this in OS 9.1 :)

now user Cpu usage is about 35% and system about 61%
 
If you look at the CPU Monitor preferences, then you'll see that the colors match categories of processes.

Basically, lots of RED will slow a system down while GREEN just means that stuff is happening (but it's not critical and It'll share the CPU). GRAY is idle (I think)
 
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