Ian, a MacCrazy reader writes:
- How To View App Resource Usage On A Macbook
- How To View App Resource Usage On A Mac Os
- How To View System Resources On Mac
- How To View App Resource Usage On A Macbook Pro
- How To View App Resource Usage On A Macbook Air
My MacBook Pro (2.66 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB HD, OSX Lion 10.7.4) started to be very hot and noisy (fan) immediately after I installed the Microsoft Office for Mac Service Pack 2 (14.2) update specifically whenever I ran Outlook, despite no problem with Outlook prior to this. The CPU activity showed that Outlook was using approx. 90% of CPU. After 5 days I removed MS Office completely and reinstalled it without updating to SP2 and everything was fine again. Then some days later, when the fix was released for SP2 (14.2.1), I again installed it, and then the problem of excessive noise and overheating has resumed. Then, to my dismay, my MBP stopped working altogether – Apple Support advised me to return it to the dealer, who found that a cable to the hard-disk was burned out — they replaced it within a day and I got my MBP back intact. I tried your suggestion for a SMC reset, but the CPU hyperactivity, the overheating, and the noisy fan persist whenever I try to run Outlook (not otherwise). I would be so grateful for any help — can you advise me?
UPDATE – 6 Novemeber 2012: It looks like we’ve got a fix – thanks to Alastair Brown for reporting it. Go to the end of the article for the fix.
Show All Running Apps and Processes On Mac Using the Activity Monitor on Mac. Activity Monitor can be described as the Mac equivalent of a Task Manager in a Windows computer. The Activity Monitor provides a very good view of the App and processes running on your Mac and the amount of resources being uses by these Apps and Processes. See which apps are hogging your Mac's resources. Free Mac app System Lens shows you which apps are hogging system resources and lets you quickly close any offenders. On the View menu, click Gantt Chart. Click the heading of the Task Name column to select all tasks. On the Project menu, point to Outline, point to Show, and then click All Subtasks. To display hidden tasks' assignments in a Resource Usage view, or resourve assignments in a Task Usage view in Project 2010, follow these steps. Monitor hardware and resource usage. MacOS doesn't come with a decent tool for monitoring temperatures and fan speeds, but Sensei has you covered. All Mac components that are equipped with these sensors will be watched by the app, giving you all the info you need in one place.
![Resource Resource](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134207260/967224860.jpg)
Ian, sorry to hear you’re having problems with Microsoft Outlook having high CPU usage. I run Outlook for Mac, mainly on a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and occasionally on a MacBook Air running Mac OS X Lion, but haven’t had this issue. Most probably, it’s configuration specific.
Googling “outlook mac high cpu“, other people seem to have your exact problem. Outlook runs at 100% CPU, using a whole CPU core. This makes the Mac hot, and in a laptop depletes the battery quickly.
A SMC reset won’t stop Outlook from burning CPU.
How To View App Resource Usage On A Macbook
A number of fixes are suggested on these pages:
- Outlook for Mac 2011 crashes or hangs at startup (mega list of things to try when Outlook is misbehaving)
The fixes suggested are:
- Apply the latest updates. You’re on update 14.2.1; there’s a newer version available: Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac 14.2.2 Update. I doubt this will help you.
- Rebuild the Outlook database, by holding the Option key when starting Outlook. This has helped no-one with this issue that I can see.
- Turn off the SyncServiceAgent.
- Verify the Outlook Identity.
- Delete your accounts (identities) and add them back in.
- Rebuild your Spotlight index.
- Open Outlook 2011 without running schedules or trying to connect to a mail server. Hold the Shift key when starting Outlook.
- Remove Outlook preferences.
- Start your Mac in safe mode.
- Create a new Mac user account and try Outlook from it.
![Usage Usage](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134207260/367292106.png)
I don’t see anyone clearly winning. That is to say, I can’t find anyone who has really fixed this yet. This high CPU usage issue seems to related to the Contact management features of Outlook.
If you’re up for trying all of these Ian, perhaps we will be the first to crack it!
If you’re out of patience, I’d go for the solution you’ve already found:
- Uninstall Microsoft Office for Mac
- Do a fresh install of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac
- Do not apply Microsoft Office 2011 Service Pack 2
- Turn off automatic updates to Microsoft Office
- Knowing that your copy Microsoft Office is not being updated, and so won’t be protected against new security vulnerabilities, only open Word, Powerpoint and Excel files from trusted sources.
- Log this bug with Microsoft so they fix it.
- Check the Internet every few months to see if Microsoft has released and update to fix this bug, and if so, turn automatic updates back on. (Take a TimeMachine backup first, so you can revert your Mac if the update doesn’t really fix the issue.)
You could also try using Mac Mail instead. It typically has about 1% CPU usage. Mac Mail will certainly work well for POP and IMAP email accounts. It does have support for MS Exchange email accounts; I haven’t tried this myself.
How To View App Resource Usage On A Mac Os
Ian, just for interest, a couple of questions:
- Did your MacBook Pro come with Lion installed, or did you upgrade to Lion?
- Did you ever have Microsoft Office 2008 installed on that Mac? (e.g. From using the Mac Migration Assistant to port your apps and settings from an older Mac.
- What types of email accounts are you using? MS Exchange, POP and/or IMAP?
Update – 6 November 2012
How To View System Resources On Mac
Alastair Brown reports that upgrading to version 14.2.3 solved the issue. He noted he did rebuild his identity, so that may be a necessary step as well. Please comment below to let us know if the upgrade fixes the issue for you. Thanks Alastair!
Activity Monitor User Guide
How To View App Resource Usage On A Macbook Pro
You can see the amount of system memory being used on your Mac.
- In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Memory (or use the Touch Bar) to see the following in the bottom of the window:
- Memory Pressure: Graphically represents how efficiently your memory is serving your processing needs.Memory pressure is determined by the amount of free memory, swap rate, wired memory, and file cached memory.
- Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed.
- Memory Used: The amount of RAM being used. To the right, you can see where the memory is allocated.
- App Memory: The amount of memory being used by apps.
- Wired Memory: Memory required by the system to operate. This memory can’t be cached and must stay in RAM, so it’s not available to other apps.
- Compressed: The amount of memory that has been compressed to make more RAM available.When your computer approaches its maximum memory capacity, inactive apps in memory are compressed, making more memory available to active apps. Select the Compressed Memory column, then look in the VM Compressed column for each app to see the amount of memory being compressed for that app.
- Cached Files: The size of files cached by the system into unused memory to improve performance.Until this memory is overwritten, it remains cached, so it can help improve performance when you reopen the app.
- Swap Used: The amount of space being used on your startup disk to swap unused files to and from RAM.
- To display more columns, choose View > Columns, then choose the columns you want to show.
How To View App Resource Usage On A Macbook Air
You can use Activity Monitor to determine if your Mac could use more RAM.