How to use Activity Monitor to handle troublesome apps on your Mac

Activity Monitor can show you which apps are chewing up the most CPU resources, memory, disk activity, and network bandwidth.

Sometimes your Mac may not run as smoothly or as quickly as you expect. And the culprit may be a single application. A lone app can bump into performance issues, slowing down not just itself but your entire computer. An app may even freeze or become unresponsive to the point that you can't close it the usual way. Whatever the problem, one tool that can help is Activity Monitor.