Check CPU Usage using Mac Terminal Command

If you want to see how much of your CPU has been utilized using the Mac Terminal, you can make use of the top command.

% top

Processes: 458 total, 2 running, 456 sleeping, 2089 threads                                                                                                                                    14:24:45
Load Avg: 1.81, 3.26, 3.12  CPU usage: 5.97% user, 4.77% sys, 89.24% idle   SharedLibs: 325M resident, 55M data, 17M linkedit. MemRegions: 94563 total, 1540M resident, 112M private, 600M shared.
PhysMem: 7560M used (1438M wired, 3414M compressor), 70M unused. VM: 176T vsize, 4691M framework vsize, 3446654(4) swapins, 4244623(0) swapouts.
Networks: packets: 2801592/2823M in, 1270423/358M out. Disks: 7686726/182G read, 2692714/95G written.

PID    COMMAND      %CPU TIME     #TH    #WQ  #PORT MEM    PURG   CMPRS  PGRP  PPID  STATE    BOOSTS            %CPU_ME %CPU_OTHRS UID  FAULTS    COW    MSGSENT   MSGRECV   SYSBSD      SYSMACH
152    WindowServer 22.7 02:25:35 18     5    3175  480M+  0B     114M-  152   1     sleeping *0[1]             0.50648 0.30791    88   8815931+  13175  48234252+ 45174018+ 509115039+  176571614+
0      kernel_task  20.1 02:04:50 477/8  0    0     402M   0B     0B     0     0     running   0[0]             0.00000 0.00000    0    69926     0      74546920+ 52156366+ 0           0
1890   Terminal     17.1 02:33.98 10     3    495-  121M-  0B     24M-   1890  1     sleeping *0-[1648]         0.27787 0.33938    501  933406+   319    1192014+  198628+   23301356+   3056304+
187    airportd     6.0  08:43.90 13     11   372+  15M+   0B     2688K- 187   1     sleeping *21942+[5225]     0.42404 4.95020    0    1044935+  201    2010957+  1269261+  14457130+   3400007+
12329  Wi-Fi        4.9  02:09.36 4      2/1  260   34M-   0B     9296K  12329 1     sleeping *1577+[276]       4.66060 0.11757    501  529179+   371    64451+    33527+    5049072+    237162+
13127  top          4.5  00:01.01 1/1    0    27    6481K  0B     0B     13127 12865 running  *0[1]             0.00000 0.00000    0    9446+     83     424786+   212387+   37237+      279103+
12322  Wi-Fi        1.5  00:24.46 3      1    211   20M    0B     7984K  12322 1     sleeping  0[3499+]         0.19037 0.11214    501  219842    358    15899+    4984+     224484+     56265+

Press q to come back to the Terminal shell prompt.

You can see how much the CPU is utilized and how much is free and each process details how much CPU percentage they are utilizing.

This is not an AI-generated article but is demonstrated by a human on an M1 Mac running macOS Sonoma 14.0.

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