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Lack of task manager. OSXs achilles heel.

P

pstrauss

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I just want to throw out there that damn, if only OS X had a good task manager. I have had several instances, including one moments ago where my mac locks up from some faulty program (usually photoshop or itunes, thanks cover flow) that cripples the entire OS rather than the one program. Unfortunately, coming from a PC environment, this is really frustrating. I know you can do the CMD ALT ESC to force quit, but lets be honest, that never works once the system is locked.

I use Time Machine but the nearest I'll ever be is the last hour, and that's still an hours worth of work down the drain. Saving often has never had as much meaning to me as it does now that I have a Mac 😡. Don't hate on me though, I love the thing, but just have to say how frustrating it is that force quit is my only hope for saving myself from a restart. Boo-urns.
 
Activity Monitor, dude. It's under Utilities.

Get your system checked out; if I have a stuck app, I can ALWAYS click down to the Finder and fix it from there.
 
what are you talking about? going to apple menue than force quit always quits the app for me

plus as others mentioned, activity montor is the task manager
 
Or you can go old school, and run top in Terminal to see what apps are proc hungry. If you're willing to gamble, you can kill by PID. Just don't kill anything with too low a number, esp the kernel_task.
 
Do you miss the blue screen of death too?

Earlier replies are spot on. Lots of ways to deal with this.
 
One more: if there's an app that is specifically beachballing on you and refusing to respond, you can right-click or Control-click that application's icon on the dock, and select "force quit."

Also, if coverflow is causing you to hang up, then something isn't right. Coverflow hasn't caused me any problems at all.
 
scaredpoet said:
One more: if there's an app that is specifically beachballing on you and refusing to respond, you can right-click or Control-click that application's icon on the dock, and select "force quit."

Also, if coverflow is causing you to hang up, then something isn't right. Coverflow hasn't caused me any problems at all.
Click to expand...

I have a feeling this person has a fairly old mac, whihc he is using to run leopard or something. in other words he's pushing his mac. In that case cover flow may be a tad much. But i agree cover flow has never given me a problem before.

Also the way this user describes that when ONE application locks up the whole system locks up. that reminds me of my old G3 iMac I used for the longest time.... but any mac that is less then 3 years old, can EASILY run the newest software, and can easily have a program lock up but not freeze itself.

One of the best things about OS X when it first came out was the fact that OS X ran in an enviroment, where all applications functioned as if they were in their own little "box". For a long time windows users were VERY VERY envious of this in OS X.
 
I have had the system jam up such that you can't Force Quit. However, most of the time it was due to hardware problems with my external boot drive. But the fact remains that it can happen.

If you know you are going to be jamming up the GUI a lot, you can often SSH in and kill bad processes from another system, because usually when the Aqua interface is jammed, the underlying system is not.
 
Amdahl said:
I have had the system jam up such that you can't Force Quit. However, most of the time it was due to hardware problems with my external boot drive. But the fact remains that it can happen.

If you know you are going to be jamming up the GUI a lot, you can often SSH in and kill bad processes from another system, because usually when the Aqua interface is jammed, the underlying system is not.
Click to expand...

thats an interesting idea... quite honestly restarted your computer would be easier. But if your desperate to not lose your unsaved data then that would be smart.

For anyone wondering some quick terminal SSH command is
Code: 
SSH *the computer your connecting to's admin username*@*computers IP address*
then when it asks for password, enter the password for the admin account. Im not sure, but I think the command to force quit something throuhg terminal is
Code: 
killall *application name*
But i might be wrong on that second command. idk for sure.
 
To the OP: that's unfortunate. When I had a bad cable going from my TM HDD to my MacBook, I was also wishing there was a quick-access Activity Monitor/Task Manager, since I wasn't able to cmd+alt+esc or access the Apple button.

However, that was the only time I had ever had such a bad problem in OSX. Everything before then and after has been smooth sailing; I've been on OSX for 11 months now.

HawaiiMacAddict said:
Aloha everyone,

I used the 'top' command and noticed that I have 1 zombie and 1 stuck process, at least. I can't tell which ones are the zombie and the stuck process, but can't tell from what I'm seeing. If anyone can assist me with this please let me know. Also, I'd like to know if a zombie process is normal, or if this type of process is to be expected.

Mahalo in advance,

HawaiiMacAddict
Click to expand...

It looks like your Safari is taking near 300MB of RAM. I hear Safari is a vigorous cacher, so you might like to try and restart it.
 
HawaiiMacAddict said:
I used the 'top' command and noticed that I have 1 zombie and 1 stuck process, at least. I can't tell which ones are the zombie and the stuck process, but can't tell from what I'm seeing. If anyone can assist me with this please let me know. Also, I'd like to know if a zombie process is normal, or if this type of process is to be expected.
Click to expand...

Zombies are a relatively common occurrence in any system that's been running a while and had several things started/stopped. Ideally, there'd never be any, but realistically, there's bound to be some undead process that the system couldn't kill. Having one is no biggie.

Or, more succinctly, zombies happen™.
 
applefan69 said:
thats an interesting idea... quite honestly restarted your computer would be easier. But if your desperate to not lose your unsaved data then that would be smart.

For anyone wondering some quick terminal SSH command is
Code: 
SSH *the computer your connecting to's admin username*@*computers IP address*
then when it asks for password, enter the password for the admin account. Im not sure, but I think the command to force quit something throuhg terminal is
Code: 
killall *application name*
But i might be wrong on that second command. idk for sure.
Click to expand...

Depending on who owns the process you may have to add sudo before the kill:

sudo kill *application pid*

or if it is particularly stubborn

sudo kill -9 *application pid*

And that is "Task Manager" enough for me..hehe 🙂

Cheers
 
I'm actually going to agree with the OP. Force Quit isn't as effective as Task Manager; there are simply too many times that it doesn't work. And while you can often kill the process via Activity Monitor (or Terminal), it just isn't nearly as convenient as the Task Manager, which is always a simple keystroke away.
 
Xeem said:
I'm actually going to agree with the OP. Force Quit isn't as effective as Task Manager; there are simply too many times that it doesn't work. And while you can often kill the process via Activity Monitor (or Terminal), it just isn't nearly as convenient as the Task Manager, which is always a simple keystroke away.
Click to expand...

command + space

term

enter

and you have your terminal in 10.5 anyway (I think there is an additional arrow down involved in the process in 10.4)

I believe and I could very well be wrong that task manager is actually a 3 finger salute away 🙂
 
pstrauss said:
I just want to throw out there that damn, if only OS X had a good task manager. I have had several instances, including one moments ago where my mac locks up from some faulty program (usually photoshop or itunes, thanks cover flow) that cripples the entire OS rather than the one program. Unfortunately, coming from a PC environment, this is really frustrating. I know you can do the CMD ALT ESC to force quit, but lets be honest, that never works once the system is locked.

I use Time Machine but the nearest I'll ever be is the last hour, and that's still an hours worth of work down the drain. Saving often has never had as much meaning to me as it does now that I have a Mac 😡. Don't hate on me though, I love the thing, but just have to say how frustrating it is that force quit is my only hope for saving myself from a restart. Boo-urns.
Click to expand...

Cmd-Alt-Esc works every time for me when I have a locked app, and the locked app rarely affects everything else except on my slow machines.

And Activity Monitor does exactly what you're looking for. But if you're having lockups that often there might be a deeper issue.
 
If you press "Shift" while you have the Apple button open (upper left corner), it will say "Force Quit <Name of Current App>" instead of the generic "Force Quit" which will give you a menu. Perhaps this could help someone, hopefully.
 
ebel3003 said:
Use the unix command "renice" in terminal. Execute "man renice" for how to use the command.
Click to expand...

Yeah, because I should really have to go into the Terminal to do this. Real user friendly.

Just accept that this is a shortcoming that Apple needs to address.
 
Eidorian said:
Using the command line isn't a shortcoming.
Click to expand...

Not having it in a user-friendly GUI mode in Activity Monitor.app IS a shortcoming.

Yeah, it's nice that there's a Unix command for it, but really, do you expect people using OSX to run fsck instead of going to Disk Utility?
 
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