I was wondering what the regular things that should be in the Activity Monitor when opened. I remember checking it out long time ago and wasn't much on there. Now there are twenty things on there now, mostly under root. Can anyone clue me in on this root thing/Root log~in. I did it once for some QT plug-ings? Is that why there are so many things going on now?
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Activity Monitor
- Thread starter Swoop
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Processes running as root tend to be the background stuff essential for the OS itself and various networking functions. Root is the Super User in UNIX, roughly equivalent to SYSTEM in Windows. You should never login as root unless you've accidentally broken your admin account.
There are several processes running as root on every OSX machine, such as the Launch Daemon, Virtual Memory pager, CUPS printing etc., so you won't have suddenly caused it to be used when you logged in as it.
There are several processes running as root on every OSX machine, such as the Launch Daemon, Virtual Memory pager, CUPS printing etc., so you won't have suddenly caused it to be used when you logged in as it.
dynamicv summarises it nice and succinctly. If there are any processes that look to be using up a lot of resources (CPU or RAM), post their names here and we should be able to tell you what they're doing and if you can quit them. This is much simpler than listing all possible processes in Activity Monitor. 