Monitoring Process Management
A process is a running program or set of threads, and an address space. A thread is a set of instructions that can be assigned independently to the CPU. Therefore, different threads of a single process can run on one processor at different times, or at the same time on different processors. This is called symmetric multi processing . The job of a process is to manage memory and other resources related to the execution of its threads. Processes can run without an explicit user interface: for example, some applications and most system-level processes, called daemons (pronounced "demons"), run in faceless mode.Lesson 3, "User Accounts," every program (and therefore every process) is owned by a user. Activity Monitor tells you who owns each process, its status, how much of the CPU is being used to run the process, and how much memory is used by the process. You can identify the process by its ID number, which appears in the Process ID column. Each process ID (PID) is unique.Troubleshooting Applications in Mac OS X," later in this lesson.The bottom pane of Activity Monitor contains buttons you can click to see system-wide information about the CPU, system memory, disk activity, disk usage, and network statistics.
Using Activity Monitor to Force a Process to Quit
Activity Monitor is just one of several tools you can use to force quit an application; it's particularly handy for force quitting a process that is running in the background, such as the Dock.
Understanding Protected Memory
Protected memory is a memory scheme in which each process gets its own address space. This memory space is protected because the operating system prevents processes from trying to use memory outside of their allocated space, which is a frequent cause of system crashes on other systems.
