HOWTO | Dealwith unwanted and misbehaving processes
1
Ditch login items
If your Mac is slow on launch or starts up with apps you no longer use, you need to prune your login items. Open System Preferences and select Users & Groups. Under your account, select Login Items and examine the list. In some cases, you see apps or items you want to be immediately available on start-up. Should the list include items or services you no longer use, select each and click the minus button. Depending on your previous Mac usage, you may find Apple components in the list, such as SpeechSynthesisServer and iTunesHelper. The former usually appears when you’ve used OS X’s voice-oriented accessibility features, and the latter watches for connected iOS devices, launching iTunes when one’s attached. It’s safe to remove these.
Related to this tip, remain vigilant. On install, some apps attempt to pre-select a ‘launch on start-up’ option, and others are sneakier still, adding it without you realising. Therefore, periodically check login items and preferences of new apps, to keep your Mac as clean as possible on start-up.
2
Find unruly user processes
If something goes wrong on your Mac, such as a system component not working correctly or becoming unresponsive, Activity Monitor can often help. The app was updated for OS X 10.9 but remains similar in terms of functionality. Using the View menu (or the menu next to the search field on older versions of OS X), you can filter processes, so select My Processes to show those related specifically to your user account. When components become unresponsive, they often display in red. These can be selected and force-quit using the quit button at the top-left of the window. You sometimes see huge CPU readings for a component of an app that’s not doing anything, and this could also be a quit candidate if said component doesn’t over time reduce its usage and is unresponsive.
3
Kill unruly processes
Sometimes, quitting a component related to an app fixes a problem, when just quitting the app wouldn't. For example, when iTunes can’t find an iOS device over Wi-Fi, kill AppleMobileDeviceHelper, then quit and restart iTunes. With browsers, the app is one process but its tabs are separate ones. So for Safari, you see ‘Safari Web Content’ for each open tab, and Google Chrome runs a ‘Google Chrome Helper’ process for each tab/plug-in. You can force-quit just the process taking up loads of CPU resources rather than the entire browser should it become unresponsive.
Using the menu mentioned in the previous step, you can filter the Activity Monitor processes list in other ways, displaying inactive processes, windowed ones (that is, standard apps), those related to the system, or a list of everything (‘all processes’). Occasionally, you find a system process has failed. If you’re running iStat Menus and that goes wrong, it uses resources under WindowServer (Other User Processes) and can cause issues with that process. A force-quit should be a last resort, because the results aren’t always predictable. Quitting WindowServer should send you to the login screen, then back to your open apps once you login. But quitting major system processes can cause hangs.
4
Get rid of launch agents
Although we’ve dealt with login items, your system may also have launch agents and launch daemons, along with legacy start-up items, that you no longer need running. These live in the Library folders that are part of OS X. Legacy items are found in /System/Library/StartupItems and/or /Library/StartupItems. Unwanted items can be trashed. Elsewhere, launch items are found in the following locations: ~/Library/LaunchAgents (launched when your account logs in); /Library/LaunchAgents (launched when anyone logs in); /Library/LaunchDaemons (launched when the Mac starts up). There are also LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folders in /System/Library, but do not tinker with these – they’re strictly for OS X components.
Typically, launch items housed elsewhere can be identified by the filename string. For example, com.crashplan.engine. plist relates to file-sync service Crashplan’s background engine, and com.bombich.ccc.plist is Carbon Copy Cloner’s system that deals with timed back-ups. Unwanted items can be deleted. Any changes made become apparent on a restart. Note: if you’re wary about trashing an item, move it to a Finder folder instead, so you can put it back later if you err and something you still use stops working.