Activity Monitor (second part)

We are now going to explain the meaning of information that are displayed at the bottom of the Activity Monitor window:

As you can see from the screenshot above, depending on what you select, information will appear on your selection. We are now going to analyze in great detail, information about each device that you can select.

CPU

On this screen you can view data related to the commitment of the CPU. Employment as a percentage of the CPU is divided between user processes, including system processes and the CPU is not used. It is then shown the number of threads and processes currently running totals on your computer.

Memory System

We are now going to analyze information relating to your use of the memory RAM on your computer and also in this case there is a division.

• Free: indicates the momoria available to run new applications.
• Wired: indicates the memory occupied by the operating system. Usually the amount of memory used goes from 270 to 300 megabytes (MB).
• Active: Indicates the memory currently occupied by the running processes.
• Inactive: indicates the memory that was previously occupied by some processes that have now been closed. This memory is still available for any other applications running.
• Used: Indicates the total amount of memory used up to that point.

Finally, continuing analysis of the information proposed to be the most important is that VM size indicates the size of virtual memory available, or that part of the hard disk that is used as a RAM.

Disk Activity

We are now going to analyze information relating to your use of our computer's hard drive. As regards the first column of information, the most significant are: reading input and writing output to denote the total number of readings of the data on the hard disk and the total number of entries made ​​on the hard drive. In the next column indicates the amount of data read and written esperessa in megabytes or gigabytes. Finally, the data may prove to be the most important are data read / sec (data read per second) and written data / sec (data written per second) that inform you of your hard drive at that time. This information is very useful to detect any anomalies in using the hard drive by some applications.

Disk Usage

This block of information is easy to interpret as it is shown to the user how much hard drive space and free space. As you can see in the screenshot you can select the hard disk to which we seek information if they possessed more than one.

Network

In this last task, we find the block of information on network activity on your computer. It 'should analyze the information provided on this page because it is very useful to detect abnormal network by an usage of some applications. First of all we have the total number of packets sent and received by our computer. These packages because the data, the Internet, are transmitted from a source and a destination in packages that identify the message to be transmitted. In the adjacent column is shown instead of the amount of data sent and received up to that time, expressed in megabytes.

Both as regards the amount of data packets that you can get an estimate of transmission per second.

In later chapters we will present some of the applications that Mac OS X makes available to perform common tasks.

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