[paularizer]

Does anyone know how to find out what all the processes on the activity monitor do? I'm mean, if you're running a certain app and it shows up there, there's no mystery as to what that means. But there's a lot of stuff there that I have no idea what it's for or what it does. things like "mdworker" (the other day this was taking up all my cpu and I kept quiting it but it kept popping back up), "launchd", "pboard", "UserEvenAgent", "ATSServer", "SystemUIServer". What the hell are these things?

They all have a purpose and I would just like to know what it is so I can better manage my system.


Thanks!

[mduell]

They're all things you need.

mdworker is the Spotlight indexing process.
launchd is the daemon that starts all your apps/processes at startup.
SystemUIServer is the application that generates your user interface.
etc

There's no point in stopping any of them unless they're misbehaving.