My Activity Monitor does not have any columns that show more details about each process.
I've already ensured that under "View" in the menu bar, the relevant columns are enabled.
MacOS – Activity Monitor columns missing
activity-monitormacos
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There is a bug in Activity Monitor v10.8.0 (806). If you select Dock Icon > Show CPU History, is automatically closes the floating window and appears in the dock. If you attempt to switch back to the floating window, sometimes only one core appears.
Solution: - Close floating windows - Dock Icon > Show Memory Usage - Quit and Restart Activity Monitor - Dock Icon > Show Application Icon - Quit and Restart Activity Monitor - Monitors > Show CPU History
Now you should see all of your cores/vccores. :-)
This bug is not always reproducible, but I've experienced it before.
Those numbers match the Mach messages in/out counts, so you seem to be correct in not interpreting them as the objc_msgSend counts.
You can learn more about higher level message counts by firing up Instruments (part of the freely downloadable Xcode toolset) and digging into a specific application to see what messages are being sent and when.
It can filter all allocations as well as allocations relating to ObjC and you can dig into much lower level details than just message send counts. The canonical documentation that is part of Xcode will help you make sense of these statistics and how they relate to Activity Monitor.
Specifically, search for NSObjCMessageLoggingEnabled and objc_msgSend in the Mac OS X Debugging Magic - Tools Guide portion of the Reference Documentation to get at the objC counts.
Search for mach message in Xcode and look for the IPC/Message Queues section of the Kernel Programming Guide for mach message queue details and what makes them up. They are much lower level IPC kernel traffic as you have surmised.
You probably can find it on developer.apple.com as well, but having the documentation local from within Xcode has many advantages.
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Best Answer
You can reset your Activity Monitor settings by quitting Activity Monitor, and then deleting the preferences file, and any preferences lock files, and then re-opening the app.
Open Terminal and paste in the following command:
(Note the * at the end to delete com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist.lock and com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist.)
Hit enter, and reopen Activity monitor - the columns should now be present.