Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Killing Run-away Process on My MAC

My battery power was being drained quickly. After unplugging my laptop and walking across campus my battery left was less than 2 hours. Very odd for my macbook pro.

I dropped to a Terminal window and found the following really helped.

 top -o cpu -O +rsize -s 5 -n 20

Whatever process floated to the top I killed. The first was an old wine process that should have already been gone. Another was a screen process that I was using to open a com port for configuring a wireless router. Neither were needed and killing both immediately helped.

My fan has quit running constantly, the processor is cooling down and I gained an hour of battery life in 5 minutes.