Why is Activity Monitor consistently using high CPU %?

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I've had Activity Monitor open for a couple of minutes now and it is hovering between 30-70% cpu use. With a quad-core CPU I think that is somewhat misleading but even so, should the system monitoring process itself be using substantial system resources? Is it normal?

Running Catalina 10.15.7 on a 2012 Mac Mini.


Solution 1:

You can change the refresh frequency. CPU usage should be roughly proportional.

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I'm on a 2021 MacBook Air and it's still between 5 and 10 % with updates only every 5 seconds, so your numbers seem to be perfectly fine.