[Chippy569]

I loved hijack this on my PC, but i've had no luck finding an equivalent for OSX. i'm running 10.4.11 on a macbook pro, and i'm having some problems with latency while running some audio software. I'm trying to figure out what else is sucking my CPU dry.

[tomdkat]

I think 'top' (if it's available on OS X) would be the tool you want.

Peace...

[macfan777]

The easiest thing to use is Activity Monitor and just see what's taking up CPU. If that doesn't help, try Console, which gives a TON of information. Those should be all the info you'll ever need.

[Chippy569]

all right, can anyone explain this? every second or so, these three items would pop up and disappear again.




any clue what those three things are?

[tomdkat]

Which three items? AppleSpell, iChat, and iChatAgent? What you're looking at is the list of actively running processes. Some will run in the "foreground", meaning you're actually using the application running in that process, and some will run in the "background", meaning they get time to run when the system is idle or at unpredictable intervals.

Some things need to run periodically as part of the operating system's operation.

If you click the "CPU" column header, you can sort that display by CPU usage. Click it once to sort in one direction (either ascending or descending) and click it again to sort in the other direction. To see which processes are taking the most CPU, click the "CPU" column header until the list sorts descending. Then, the entries at the top of the list will be taking the most CPU and you'll know what your culprits are.

Any process that is "hogging" CPU will have a CPU usage of 90% or more constantly while you're looking at the list of running processes. Of course, if you're running an app that is CPU intensive, it will "hog" the CPU. If you do this while the system is idle (you're not running any apps), you can see if anything unexpected is "hogging" CPU, thereby causing slower system performance.

By the way, the "top" command will display the same kind of info the Activity Monitor above shows.

Peace...

[Chippy569]

no, "cut" "greb" and "sh"

[tomdkat]

Ah, ok. Those appear to be part of some kind of script that is running, possibly in support of some application you're running. So, what apps are you running at the time you took the screenshots? I see Firefox, iChat, iTunes, Entourage, some HP processes, and some system processes. What else are you running?

Peace...

[tomdkat]

Ok, I believe I found the answer to your question. According to this thread, it's "coreduo temp" that is causing the processes you inquired about to run. I guess the "coreduo temp" program uses shell scripting to do some of its work and you're seeing the shell commands cut and grep run in the "sh" shell process.

Peace...

[Chippy569]

ah, thank you. i'm still not sure what's eating my proc though.

[tomdkat]

Again, if you click the CPU column header to sort descending the process list by CPU usage, you can see what's chewing up CPU (if anything). From what I can see above, it looks like your system is idling most of the time. If you click "System Memory", you can look at your memory usage information and see if you've got a RAM shortage of some kind that will causing swapping, which will also negatively impact system performance.

Peace...

[Chippy569]

here's a few more pics of me trying to run Reason, which has little pops and other proc-related discontinuities.





i used to be able to run it just fine o.O

[tomdkat]

How much RAM do you have installed? From a CPU utilization standpoint, everything looks great.

EDIT: Please click "System Memory" so we can see how your memory usage looks.

Peace...

[Chippy569]

this is a macbook pro with 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

I rebooted, launched reason, and launched activity monitor. here's what i got.


just for giggles, i switched to CPU and took another shot. that HUGE spike is where i took the first screenshot.

[tomdkat]

Originally Posted by Chippy569

this is a macbook pro with 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

Thanks. The second set of screenshots show a different application mix than the first shot, namely Firefox didn't appear to be running in the second set of screenshots.

From what I can see in the second set of screenshots, you're doing great on RAM and it looks like "Reason" is simply a CPU intensive application. If you run Reason with Firefox and other apps, they will all "compete" for the CPU and it will simply have to work harder.

Does the "Reason" application also run on Windows? Was it developed on Mac OS X, do you know? The reason (no pun intended ) I ask is if "Reason" started life on Windows and was ported to Mac OS X, the port might not have been optimal.

Have you contacted the "Reason" application vendor about the performance issues you're experiencing to see if they have any system tuning tips or info?

With regard to your system being "hijacked", it doesn't look like that at all. You've got plenty of RAM and you just need to find out why Reason doesn't perform as well as you would like on your system.

EDIT: You can find a forum here that is maintained by the Reason software vendor. I don't know if you're running version 3 or 4 of Reason but that forum might provide better info for you regarding Reason performance on OS X.

Peace...

[Chippy569]

thanks! yes i'm running reason v. 4. there's a 4.0.1 update for OS X that i haven't installed yet (requires install discs which i don't have with me at uni.) I'll check there. thanks!