Using Activity Monitor

Welcome to the world of Unix (Darwin)!

I only have 4 (four) applications running on my machine, but there are 50 processes running. 18 of these are supporting my activities directly, and 31 are owned by root (the odd one out is WindowServer, which is the parent process for most of my acitivity).

All of these processes are doing something useful. Do not try to Quit them unless you know exactly what they are for (and even then, be prepared for a crash!)

You wouldn't gain very much space anyway, and if your applications need the space, the idle processes will be swapped out. You might like to read Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor for more information.

As a general rule this is not something you need to worry about. Are you having a particular problem, such as the computer running too slow, or just curious? If there's a problem Activity Monitor is good for telling you what is going on but not the place to fix it.

Click on %CPU and make sure the arrow is pointing down. This will sort all processes according to how much of the CPU they are using. You should see that most of them are at zero. Just because they are open doesn't mean they are using the computer. What you should watch for is something using too much or suddenly jumping up high.

If I look at mine right now the only things using CPU are activity monitoer at 4.5%, TabletDriver (I use a Wacom tablet) 1.8% and Firefox at .5%. That's a total of 6.1% with all the rest showing zeros.

If you try to quit a process that is necessary it either won't let you quit it or will restart the computer the instant you quit. It isn't likely to do damage but best to not quit processes when you don't know what they are.