Filed under: OS, Software, Productivity, Tips and tricks, UNIX / BSD, Troubleshooting
List of Mac OS X's processes and their purpose
Have you ever opened Activity Monitor to check on what processes and apps your Mac is running, only to be greeted with a list that's about as understandable as ancient Greek? (This of course assumes that you don't know how to read ancient Greek). Well, through the beauty of diggdot.us (all the del.icio,us, digg and Slashdot posts with none of the snarky comments), I found this fairly thorough list of Mac OS X's processes that attempts to explain just what is going on under the hood. Scott blogged this a year ago, but I figured this couldn't hurt even if it is review for some of us.The author reminds us that this list is by no means complete, so don't panic if you have a process running that isn't on the list. With that said, this should be a fairly educational resource for most of us, as the list is written in plain English (as opposed to the aforementioned ancient Greek) to help make sense of just what our Mac is doing with all those little processes. Check it out.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
EatingPie said 9:49AM on 5-22-2006
Review? This is for Panther, not Tiger. And that's a world of difference, since Apple changed the background processes drastically. And they probably will again for Leopard.
Seems possible to infer some differences: blued vs. TrueBlueEnvironment... though why is the blue box (Classic) running on my Intel Mac?
The lack of documentation on these processes has always frustrated me. I want to know what my computer is doing and why. For one thing I can get a wee bit more speed if I kill unnecessary processes, for another, I can make the computer more secure if I don't run unnecessary daemons that listen on network ports.
-Pie
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