How to Kill Processes on Mac

Knowing how to force kill processes on your Mac is important, because it allows you to solve issues such as crashed or frozen applications that refuse to shut down easily. Furthermore, it may come in handy when you want to improve performance and battery life by eliminating unnecessary software. There are several ways to kill processes on your Mac:

Use the Activity Monitor

This is the equivalent of Windows' Task Manager. You can go to it through the Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor menu. This will list all processes running on your device currently – select the one you wish to stop, and then press 'Quit' in the toolbar. Keep in mind that the Activity Monitor is also helpful for identifying processes that use too much resources – keep an eye on the CPU and Memory metrics to discover processes, which use a lot of resources.

Use the Terminal

If, for some reason, the Activity Monitor is not your preferred choice, then you should know that the Terminal can serve the same purpose. Access it through Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal. Type 'sudo top' to get a list of active processes, as well as their CPU and memory usage. When you find the process you wish to eliminate, note thePID(Process ID)represented by a number. To kill the process with the PID 222, you need to type in'sudo kill -222'. Make sure to also type in your password if prompted.