Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Mickey MacMouse Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: Process names Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 20:04:30 +1300 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Lines: 36 Message-ID: <201220142004301264%mickey@mousehouse.com> References: <201220141430104225%mickey@mousehouse.com> <201220141817346353%mickey@mousehouse.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: DjFVAL4V9LOPihSa5VEp5A.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Thoth/1.5.4 (Carbon/OS X) X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: csiph.com comp.sys.mac.system:67743 In article , Martin Frost me at invalid stanford daht edu wrote: > Mickey MacMouse writes: > > > In article <201220141430104225%mickey@mousehouse.com>, Mickey MacMouse > > wrote: > > > > > I was just looking at Process Viewer to check CPU usage of an app and > > > spotted a few weird processes popping up and disappearing. These had > > > strange names like the Apple logo, the infinity sumbol, or a few other > > > weird characters. I think they were all Root processes. Anyone know > > > what these are? > > > > I was wrong. They are so quick to appear and disappear that I thought I > > had read them as root. They are instead ??? user. It is tricky to get a > > screengrab of one due to the speed and being random. I did get one as > > shown in the top entry of this screengrab. > > http://s12.postimg.org/aspu6wkgd/Process_Viewer.jpg > > Most are single character names. A few have been two to three > > characters. They could just be artefacts of Process Viewer being too > > slow to retrieve all the information as with the impossible CPU > > percentage. It is a slow old G3 CRT iMac. > > I don't know what Process Viewer is or where it comes from, but here's > a guess at what might be happening. > > Perhaps you're running Process Viewer on a version of MacOS X that is > newer than the version your Process Viewer was built for, with the > result being that it's looking at incorrect kernel locations for data. > > Martin Process Viewer is the Apple's own app that is installed in the Utilities folder when installing OS X. They changed the name of the app in later OS versions.