When I look at Activity Monitor I can see a process that is chewing up the CPU. If I go into a terminal and run a
ps auxww
the information that I get back does not match what I am seeing in Activity Monitor. Why is there a difference?
Is that the name of the process? I suppose so; does tge project id match what you are seeing in Activity Monitor?
If yhe ids match, what sort of information about the process is the one that ps and AM don’t agree on?
Is that the name of the process? I suppose so; does tge project id match what you are seeing in Activity Monitor?
If yhe ids match, what sort of information about the process is the one that ps and AM don’t agree on?
ps auxww will give you the command line details of all the processes.
ex: ps auxww | grep 'myprocess'
You can then add a grep command to get the specific process. The challenge I am running into is that the process in question runs several instances, each with a different command line switch to handle different things. I am trying to see which of these processes is the one using the CPU. For instance I have
myprocess -a
myprocess -b
myprocess -c
It may be the process with the -b switch on it, but In activity monitor, they are all collected together as a single process because they are all the same application. And if you add up the CPU utilization of all the processes with that name, they do not match up with what is showing in activity monitor.
Each process has a unique process id. That should be enough to distinguish them, no?
E.g. type ps
PID TTY TIME CMD
90527 ttys000 0:00.06 -bash
91434 ttys001 0:00.07 -bash
91761 ttys002 0:00.05 -bash
(I did not add any ps options for brevity)
These numbers on the left are the process id of several bash instances.
If I search for "bash" in Activity Monitor, I can see all those process id as well, so I know which is which.
I understand that.
But ps also gives you the pid; and so does Activity Monitor. If you ard not seeing the PID column in Activity Monitor, control-click any header (like process name, cput, etc); a menu will appear and you can check or uncheck a great number of columns.
Activity Monitor and PS info not matching