$ top -l 1 | head -n 10 | grep PhysMem | sed 's/, /n /g' It is also possible to get memory statistics on Mac PC running top in non-interactive mode and grepping it from output: To show inactive memory in Gigabytes every 10 seconds Use this obscure one liner to free -m Linux memory command like output from Mac terminal You can then extract useful information from the output file (even while it's still running), this will get you cpu load on Mac OS system spitting stats every 10 seconds.

That gathers 10 sets of metrics at 10 second intervals. To check Load from Mac OS command line use: Check out Mac OS X HDD Input / Output statistics Mac OS X comes with sar – (system activity reporter), top (process monitor) and vm_stat (virtual memory statistics) command – these ones are equivalent of Linux's sar (from sysstats package), top and Linux vmstat (report virtual memory statistics).ġ. To start Activity Monitor open Finder and launch it via :Īpplications -> Utilities -> Activity MonitorĪs a Linux guy, I like to use command line and there Mac OS X is equipped with a good arsenal of tools to check CPU load and Memory. Mac OS X has already a GUI tool called Activity Monitor (existing in Mac OS 10.3 onwards) in earlier verions, there was tool called Process Viewer and CPU Monitor. Mac has plenty of instruments to debug OS issues as it is UNIX (BSD) based. Thus cause it is among popular OSes, it very possible sooner or later as a sysadmin you will have to troubleshoot issues on at least Mac OS X notebook. For the usual admin having to administer a Mac OS X based server is something rarely to do, however it might happen some day, and besides that nowadays Mac OS X has about 10% percentage share of PC desktop and laptops used on the Internet ( data collected from w3cschools log files). You might be stunned to find out Mac OS X has a server variant called Mac OS X server.

See mac cpu usage