activity-monitor
I am struggling to find out what process is eating away my Mac performance, and disk i/o is the culprit. Activity Monitor frequently shows megabytes of read/write, but unfortunately, it does not show the per process value (only total written by given process, which is useless).
Is there a way to find out?
iotop does not seem to work, because I am on Sierra, and SIP is enabled.
Thank You,
Zsolt
Not really. The thing is, most of the time, processes in Activity Monitor don't actually have a UI that you can 'switch' to. Using the Google Chrome example, think of those 'Google Chrome Renderer' processes as background tasks, and you just see the result of them in the main 'Google Chrome' process. Activity Manager does not have a way to identify how to tie these 'background tasks' to the parent GUI.
However, for your particular problem, Google Chrome actually provides you with a Task Manager that will help you out:
In many ways, the task manager is like a hospital monitor: you can use it to track the performance of its internal processes. If the browser seems to be sluggish, open the task manager to find details about each active process and close the one that seems to be using up a lot of resources.
You can use this to identify which tab is using up too many system resources. You can also use the Process ID from the Chrome Task Manager to match the process up in Activity Monitor (Process ID == PID).
I don't know of anything with that kind of detail, but Apple's own Activity Monitor [Applications/Utilities] can show a basic history graph per core. Cmd ⌘ 3 to initiate.
System shows in red, user in green, btw.
Best Answer
iStat Menus shows, among many many other things, disk activity by process. It is not free, but you can do a 14 day trial.