System Resources

You can display one set of statistics at a time, by clicking the dropdown button () in the upper right corner of the view, then selecting one of three menu options:

System Uptime

This display shows the start time, CPU usage time, and CPU usage as a percentage of total uptime, for each process. These statistics help you monitor process performance.

General Resources

These statistics include the relative CPU usage, data segment size, and number of open file descriptors for each process, which help you monitor resource usage.

Memory Resources

These statistics include the sizes of the heap and stack segments and of the code and data segments for the program and for the loaded libraries. This memory information lets you monitor memory consumption of processes.

You can sort the process list by any displayed metric, by clicking the corresponding column header. To easily spot changed values, click the highlight button () in the upper right toolbar of the view. The view then colors in the cells containing any values that changed since the last update. You can change the highlight color in the System Information preferences, by selecting Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts > System Information > Highlight color. The default color is yellow, as seen in this sample screenshot that shows the System Uptime statistics, with the process list sorted by CPU Usage:

The CPU Usage graph is always shown, regardless of which statistics set is displayed. This line graph shows historical CPU usage by plotting the percentage of cycles consumed by various processes over time. By default, both the All Processes and Selected Processes lines are enabled, but no processes in the statistics table are selected. So initially, the chart shows only the total CPU consumption of all processes. You can click one or more table rows to see the combined CPU usage for multiple processes. You can also deselect one of the buttons just above the chart, to hide the corresponding graph line.