
Spring Cleaning Your Mac & Fixing Slack CPU Usage
Over time our computers slow down. In about 15 minutes you can often make a big impact by doing some very basic spring cleaning.
Step 1 — Open up Activity Monitor and Select “CPU”
Sort the running processes by CPU and look for any processess that are taking up an “unusually” high amount (e.g., >10%). If you are not actively doing something with that software it should not be consuming >10% of your CPU. Type the process name into a Google search like this: “Mac Slack Helper CPU usage” and look for articles that discuss if it’s a problem or if it’s normal. This should take only 5 minutes or so.

Step 2 — Do the Same Process for “Memory”
Generally, software shouldn’t be taking up more than ~250MB of memory unless you’re actively using it. Google Chrome is natoriously piggy with memory, the lesson here: close your darn tabs.

Fixing Slack CPU Usage (Example Spring Cleaning)
I noticed in my recent spring cleaning that Slack was using 29% of my CPU power and after a quick Google search I found several people who indicated that there was a clear fix, going into slack and disabling hardware accelaration. It took a few seconds to do. Quit and restarted Slack. And it was all working just fine.
