If it's an application, it will remain shut down. If it's a critical process, it will restart. The process will quit and free up the resources it was taking up. To do that, click on the process first and then on the X in the Activity Monitor toolbar. When you identify a process that's causing a problem, either because it's hogging lots of CPU cycles or memory, or because it's highlighted in the Activity Monitor as having crashed, you need to kill it. To flip the order, so that processes consuming the least of the resource are at the top, click the arrow next to Memory or CPU above the list of processes.

By default, processes are ordered starting with the one that's consuming the most of the resource at the top, so you can quickly see where problems are occurring or likely to occur. So, clicking on CPU lists tasks in the order of how much CPU capacity they're using. Clicking on any of those tabs organizes processes according to the percentage of the resource they are using. You'll notice there are five tabs across the top of the Activity Monitor window: CPU, Energy, Memory, Disk, and Network. When it appears in Spotlight, hit Return to launch it. Alternatively, press Command and spacebar to call up Spotlight, then start typing Activity Monitor.

The fastest way is to open Activity Monitor through iStat Menus. Here’s how to terminate process Mac is stuck upon:

IStat Menus also has a shortcut to opening Activity Monitor - just click the first icon on the left at the bottom of iStat’s drop-down menu.

Process manager mac