Forums | MacLife

Moving this, and don't touch any of those processes until you get an answer.

And welcome to the forums.

What is running slower:   web site loading or the computer in general ?   If websites, then there are several possibilities:  bad web coding, heavy advertising, slow servers including your ISP, especially ad-servers.

What model Mac are you running and who is your ISP ?

To answer a specific question - the Dock process is quite literally the program  that IS the dock. That particular process starts up whenever you log into your computer, and usually isn't quit until you log out or shut down.

As for quitting processes from the Activity Monitor - most processes listed there have a specific function, many of which are not obvious. Some run the file sharing or printing systems, others find other networked printers and file shares, others sit waiting around for someone to remotely log into the machine or operate the local command line. Some of these you can do without in many situations, but these usually don't eat up cpu time or much memory. Quitting them wouldn't gain you much. Others are necessary to operate the computer and force quitting one of them may A) dump you out to the login prompt or B) the computer will be forced to restart.

If you have a process that is eating up your cpu time and it doesn't correspond to some application you are actively using, I suggest plugging its name into Google to see if you can find out what it does before force quitting it.

One thing to watch out for is the listing for Free Memory - this should be above zero, ideally more than a few megabytes. When a computer fills up the ram memory it starts swapping chunks of information from the ram to the hard disk and back - to gain more working space when everything it is doing doesn't fit into ram all at the same time.  The problem is this swapping is SLOW.

There should also be a count for Pageins and Pageouts. Pageins are data being moved from the hard drive to the ram - this count going up is normal. Pageouts is the opposite direction - if this number is noticeably increasing as you use your computer then you are most likely hitting the swap.

Apple calls this swapping scheme "Virtual Memory". You may also see a size listed for "VM" (virtual memory) this is how much hard drive space is being used for this swapping, and some other normal temporary data storage. Having a VM size of a few hundred megabytes or a gig or so is normal, having this balloon in size is another sign of swapping. Quitting programs and / or rebooting can bring the amount of memory the computer is trying to use back down into range of how much you actually have. Look for both a low or zero free memory, and a sky rocketing Pageout count, alongside a big slowdown of the computer as signs of swapping, which _may_ explain your computer slowdown.

Hmm, i wonder if he/she is coming back. Maybe they killed something they shouldn't have.