[footie]

We have a new iMac.

When I run process viewer to see what is running and taking memory/cpu resources, most of the processes show up as belonging to 'root' or 'the name of my computer' that I gave it when initially setting it up.

If I watch the list from time to time I see processes with the really odd, negative number process ID's and owner is '?'. Sometimes they have no name.

What the heck is this?

We've only had this machine for a couple of weeks.

Thanks

[footie]

This is the second message I've posted here. Do you have to say something provcative to get anything interesting in response?

[gorickey]

Originally posted by footie:
This is the second message I've posted here. Do you have to say something provcative to get anything interesting in response?

LOL.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=142645

[dtriska]

Originally posted by footie:
This is the second message I've posted here. Do you have to say something provcative to get anything interesting in response?

How may I serve you, Majesty?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by footie:
This is the second message I've posted here. Do you have to say something provcative to get anything interesting in response?

No; sometimes people actually come up with a question which stumps us. You happen to be one of those.

Processes owned by root don't need to be worried about, most of the time. If something has a name like "SuperEvilComputerKillerDeathVirusX" then you might want to worry, but unfortunately most Bad Guys are smart enough to give their stuff names that don't sound suspicious, so it's not reliable to try and judge processes by name.

Processes with a "???" for an owner or negative-number process ID's are wierd, though. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Process Viewer; I use top in the Terminal to get my system information. Well, actually I use top -d; it uses less system resources so it doesn't skew the numbers as badly as Process Viewer or plain top do. It could just be a bug in Process Viewer; I'm not certain.