Application eating ~840,000,000% of my CPU I noticed that sometime some application are using some impossibly high amount of my CPU according to the Activity Monitor, as the screenshots below illustrate. How comes Activity Monitor displays such high percentages?









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The other suggestions are good, I just wanted to ad that percentages higher than 100 are, oddly enough, not counter intuitive.

very simply if you see more than 100% usage (as was explained to me) it is a combination of the number of cores in the processor (usually 2 to 8) and how busy all the cores are compared to some (unknown to me) baseline.

So getting high percentages are not uncommon but in the end a bit confusing as this question illustrates. And honestly what is going on here, specifically, is beyond me as well.