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The most basic definition of a process is 'an instance of a program in execution.' For example, at this instance, I have:

All of these run as their own process. There are also low level processes that need to run, such as:

  • the fan control
  • the kernel tasks
  • the mds (Metadata Server - part of Mac's search tool, Spotlight)
  • configd, which keeps track of network configuration information.

Each of these have their own Process Name, ID, a user who called it (in the first set of examples, it'd be the user logged in. In the low level examples, the root would be the user), a certain number of threads, a certain percentage of CPU, Real Memory, and Virtual Memory allocated for it.

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13y ago

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