One of the most common reasons for opening Activity Monitor is to check the % CPU of processes that might be running out of control. How accurate are those figures, though, and should you believe them?
Activity Monitor
Why you shouldn’t try killing kernel_task, but take action to help cool your Mac and reduce the heat it’s producing.
How could you study how Apple silicon CPU cores are used to run code? Comparisons between Activity Monitor, Xcode Instruments, and powermetrics.
The spinning beachball, a juddery interface, and fans running full pelt: what’s CPU doing in Activity Monitor, and what should you do about it?
How to tell whether an app has a memory leak, what to do about it, and the differences from a kernel memory leak.
Virtual CPU cores are of one type, and QoS has no effect in virtualised macOS. This has consequences for both the host and guest macOS.
Many apps could benefit users of Apple silicon Macs by giving them controls over core use by their threads. Here’s how that can be done simply and effectively.
How you can use the taskpolicy command to confine all the threads of a process to the E cores, as a brake, but there’s no accelerator in macOS.
How can the two E cores in an M1 Pro or Max equal performance of the four in the original M1? Why does running two threads complete in half the time taken to run one?
Threads, GCD and core allocation in Apple silicon explained. How thread priority is baked into code, and how important it is to performance.
The Eclectic Light Company 