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10.4: Increase the system's process limits
Authored by: ChrisAllison on Jul 27, '05 06:24:21PM
As was pointed out in the parent hint's linked blog post, "Every process you run from the GUI is launched by WindowServer." - Activity Console naming WindowServer as the problem is about as specific as blaming "the government" when some individual bureaucrat messes up.

I'm curious as to whether the top program would give a better output (actually name the offending process) than the Apple Activity Monitor (I don't think it should). Running the following command in a terminal will output a bunch of information you don't really care about (but which is useful in many circumstances), followed by a list of the top ten commands/processes (-n 10) which are using the cpu the most, sorted in descending order based on processor usage (-o -cpu), five times (-l 5):
top -o -cpu -n 10 -l 5
Scroll through that output (modifying it to take more samples if you so choose) to see if there are one or two commands named chewing up most of your processor.

Run with or without the limit (-l), top is a fairly processor intensive command (for the duration of its runtime), as it polls the cpu once a second to get a pretty comprehensive idea of what's going on... it's kind of like someone asking you how you feel every few seconds. Answering "How do you feel now? ... How do you feel now? ... How do you feel now? ..." over and over takes up some of your attention and thinking power. One of my theories is that the little menu bar gizmo you have reporting on Processor, Uptime, Tasks/Threads, and Load Average - all of which constitute a fair chunk of what top checks - might be responsible for the sluggish state of your machine, especially if you have it set to update every few seconds or less.

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