Is Your Apple Mac Computer Slow? Here Are A Number Of Ways To Fix It

How to fix a slow Mac is quite easy. (photo: apple)

JAKARTA – Apple's Mac computers are usually very reliable, but sometimes experience slowdown caused by one or more applications that are using a lot of memory. This may be caused by a bug commonly known as a memory leak or simply because the application is overloading a larger task than it was designed to handle.

Whatever the reason, figuring out which app is to blame can be done with the utilities built into macOS.

Apple incorporates a system analysis tool into macOS called Activity Monitor and this utility can display information about applications and system processes. Some run in the background to handle various operating needs, such as reading and writing files, internet activity, Bluetooth connection, and more.

At any given time, there are hundreds of processes running, some having multiple threads and each using at least a little bit of memory. Many wait patiently for it to trigger, using minimal processor time and other resources. Others are often active in tracking mouse movement and keyboard activity to provide a responsive user experience.

Apple's Activity Monitor app looks like a developer tool, and can certainly serve that purpose. However, it can be safely used by any Mac user to check what's going on when the computer seems sluggish.

Activity Monitor can be found by opening a Finder window, then clicking on 'Applications' in the sidebar. After opening the utility, it will display a table view of all open applications and processes with useful data columns.

Clicking the Memory tab will reveal usage details by each app and process. The important step is to select 'My Processes' in the View menu. This will filter out the long list significantly, remove a lot of system processes and make it easier to figure out which app might be causing the problem.

Clicking on the column labeled 'Memory' will sort by which process is being used the most and in some cases the number will change as the app is used.

If Mac apps use too much memory, it might slow down the whole system as macOS needs to swap data from memory to storage and back again more often.

Some applications that rely on the internet, such as the Safari browser, preload websites, photos, and other data to anticipate user activity, take up a large part of the memory. If it is not used for some time, that cache memory may be cleared, and free up resources.

Other applications, such as those that process images and videos, legitimately require large amounts of memory space to handle user requests. Finding the most memory used by an application does not necessarily indicate that there is a problem. It's also a good idea to check the processor usage by clicking the CPU tab. Clicking on the column labeled '% CPU' will sort by the application or process that is using the most processor.

If problems are found, it is best to switch to an application that is using too many resources and try to save any open files before exiting the application. If it becomes unresponsive, it can be forced to quit with the command-option-escape key combination.

After the app is closed, it may take a while for your Mac to recover resources and get back to its normal level of performance. If that doesn't help, restarting the computer may be necessary to free up memory.

With Apple's built-in utility, Activity Monitor, you can find out how much system memory is being saved and what percentage of processor power is being consumed by each app. With this information, it is possible to identify the Mac application that is experiencing the problem and shut it down to free up resources and fix any possible throttling.