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Similarly, if your startup disk is nearly full, less space is available for swap files. That’s why you want as much RAM as your budget will allow and your Mac can accommodate. If apps can’t get the CPU time they want, the beach ball appears.
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Insufficient RAM means more paging and swapping, which means fewer CPU cycles are available to apps. Virtual memory paging and swapping (freeing RAM by moving data to swap files on disk and back) consumes CPU cycles.
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The beach ball may also appear if you don’t have enough RAM. That will place a small activity graph in the corner of your screen. You can also Control-click on the icon and select Monitors -> CPU Usage, or Monitors -> Floating CPU Window. That will turn the icon itself into a CPU usage graph you can then close the main Activity Monitor window. For example, open Activity Monitor then Control-click on its Dock icon and select Dock Icon -> Show CPU Usage. You don’t have to keep an Activity Monitor window open all the time there are less obtrusive ways to use it. To find out if the CPU is a bottleneck on performance, use Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities) to monitor CPU usage.
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