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There are two types of processes on a computer, including conscious and subconscious processes. Conscious processes are applications that we launch to perform specific tasks, such as a web browser to access websites or email to manage emails.
On the other hand, subconscious processes are tasks running in the background that users are not aware of, and these are the culprits causing computer errors, especially on older machines with limited system resources.
How to Identify and Stop Lag-Causing Background Processes on Mac
Prevent Background Processes for Mac Speed Boost
Locating Culprits and Their IDs
Regardless of how robust your Mac's configuration is, system resources are shared among all active processes. If these processes collectively exceed the available resources, it can lead to system errors and freezing. To prevent this, the solution is to disable and prevent less-used processes running in the background to free up system resources.
Because there are dozens, even hundreds of processes running on your computer, the initial step is to identify which processes and IDs are consuming the most system resources and which ones are unnecessary for us to turn off.
Step 1: Open Activity Monitor through Spotlight or Alfred, or you can access Activity Monitor by navigating to /Applications/Utilities/.
Step 2: Go to the View menu, find and select All Processes.
Step 3: In the Activity Monitor window, a list of all running processes will be displayed. Your task is to organize these processes in order of CPU usage by clicking on % CPU.
By using this method, the process consuming the most system resources will appear at the top of the list. The next step you need to take is to find the ID of the process you want to stop.
In the Activity Monitor window, you will see a column labeled PID, which displays the ID of the process. In the example below, you can see the PID of Safari is 347.
Prevent Background Processes for Mac Speed Boost
To prevent background processes and boost your Mac's speed, follow the steps below:
First, open Terminal by accessing /Applications/Utilities/.
In the Terminal window, run the following command to stop a process:
kill -STOP PID
In the command above, PID is the ID number of the process you identified in the previous step. For example, if you want to stop the Safari browser process, run the following command:
Stop a process using the command:
As you can see in the screenshot below, the Safari browser on Mac is unresponsive because the browser process has been stopped.
You can also use the above command to temporarily halt other processes on the system if needed; just change the corresponding PID for the desired process.
Note: Different processes will be assigned different PIDs, and these PIDs may change each time Mac restarts.
Resume a paused process:
In case you want to resume running processes that you previously paused to use specific applications, follow the steps below:
First, open Terminal, then run the following command:
kill -CONT PID
Important Note: Use the same PID you used to pause the process in the previous step.
Pause and Resume Process via AppName:
If you encounter issues finding the PID of the application you want to pause, an alternative is to use AppName as a replacement for PID.
In the Terminal window, run the following command:
Pause Process with AppName:
Note: In the command above, replace AppName with the specific application name you find on Activity Monitor.
For example, if it's the Google Drive application, use the following command:
killall -STOP 'Google Drive'
Important Note: Use double quotes only if AppName (application name) contains spaces, such as Google Drive.
To resume running the application, in the Terminal window, run the following command, replacing AppName with the specific application name you want to pause and resume:
killall -CONT 'AppName'
For example, with the Google Drive application, run the following command:
Resume Google Drive process:
This article from Mytour just guided you on how to prevent background processes for a faster Mac. To explore more Mac acceleration tricks, readers can check out the guide on speeding up Mac OS on Mytour.
