Ever wonder what's going on when your Mac is making those churning noises? Or just which tasks are consuming your precious RAM? In this article, we'll point you to a couple of freeware utilities that let you peer into just what's going on with your Mac.

Monitoring your Mac's CPU cycles and more

Figure A: Monitor lets you know how much processing power each application is using.

By default, the window updates every two seconds, allowing you to maintain a constant picture of what applications are using the processing power. If you want to change how often the window updates, choose Update Windows from the Monitor menu. The resulting submenu allows you to set the window to update as often as every second or as infrequently as every 30 seconds.

As the Volumes window in Figure A shows, Monitor can take a look at the free space on your hard disk, any disks inserted (#1 is a Zip disk), or any other mounted volume. For more information on a volume, choose Show Volume Info from the Monitor menu.

For similar information on an application, choose Show Application Info from the Monitor menu. If you let the resulting window run for a few seconds, it will graph the CPU usage, as shown in Figure B. Among other information, the right side of the window shows how much of the memory you've allotted to the application that it's actually using. This handy data can help you determine whether you can free some of that memory for another application.

Monitor has other memory display capabilities as well: Choosing Show Memory opens the window shown in Figure C. Although this window provides essentially the same information as you see when you choose About This Computer from the Apple menu, Monitor breaks it down by percentage. The Size column tells you how much memory is allotted to each application; the Free column indicates how much of that memory the application isn't using.

Figure B: Give Monitor a minute and it will graph an application's memory usage over time.

Figure C: This utility can also display used and unused memory allotments by application.

If memory runs tight on your Mac and you'd like to find out how to cut corners, you'll find that Monitor is handy for keeping an eye on your CPU cycles. You can download this freeware utility from several places on the Internet, including www.macdownload.com.

Memory Mapper provides a closer look

Figure D: Memory Mapper graphs memory both used and unused.

Figure D: Memory Mapper graphs memory both used and unused.

Memory Mapper also lets you keep an eye on virtual memory. As you may know, virtual memory uses hard disk space as though it were RAM. If you've enabled virtual memory, the black areas just to the right of the memory graph indicate how much of that memory is paged to disk, i.e., how much of that memory is coming from that virtual memory supplied by your hard disk. You can download Memory Mapper from any Info-Mac archive, such as hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive.html, which also provides a search function that allows you to locate the file easily.

Conclusion

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