My Mac Book has come to a crawl

[MacChris]

I don't know what happened. Running 10.7 for the last 2 months and working fine. The last 2 weeks this unit has been running so slow. There is something running according to activity monitor that is eating up a whole lot of resources that is not on my MacBook Pro. It is WindowServer. I'm afraid to quit the process without knowing what it is for. Nothing has been added to the unit in the way of software. Does anyone know if this is critical and could be slowing down the unit?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

WindowServer is a process in Mac OS X, drawing all the fancy images for you to have a graphical user interface to interact with.
What does the "System Memory" tab in Activity Monitor have to say?

 

[MacChris]

WindowServer is a process in Mac OS X, drawing all the fancy images for you to have a graphical user interface to interact with.
What does the "System Memory" tab in Activity Monitor have to say?

Thanks for the reply. The same amount of extreme consumption. It was like 70%

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Thanks for the reply. The same amount of extreme consumption. It was like 70%

What was "70%"? And what about the "System Memory" tab?

example:

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Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.
Also check the "System Memory" tab to see what your "Page ins:", "Page outs:" and "Swap used:" are.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

Further reading:

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Making The Most of Activity Monitor
What Is Activity Monitor (or How to Take Your Mac's Pulse)​

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