I use the latter! I opened the Little Snitch preferences and unchecked “Show network activity in menu bar” and voila! the WindowServer process memory dropped about 15%. The suggestions included CrashPlan and Little Snitch Network Monitor.

As it turns out, when something is being drawn to the screen it takes processing power go figure! One of the top suggestions was removing or disabling things from the menu bar that are constantly updating. I understand that it’s probably a pretty heavy process, but it got me thinking, and Googling. I opened Activity Monitor and found that my WindowServer process was using a significant amount of CPU resources (up to 77% when the animated gif was visible on my screen), and that it has used significantly more than the next heaviest process since I last rebooted. This was the last straw in what has been weeks of wondering why my laptop has been slow. My laptop (3.1GHz i7 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM) has enough of power, so why has it been such a dog since starting from scratch with a fresh OS? A colleague posted an animated Gif today in Slack and my MacBook fans kicked in and it sounded like it was getting ready to fly away. The changes I explain below seem to make a difference, at least according to what Activity Monitor is showing for CPU usage. I am by no means doing some exhaustive investigation. DISCLAIMER: I’m writing about my personal experience here.

Mac activity monitor windowserver