You may think when your Mac is asleep it isn’t doing anything. You would be wrong.
Our (Ennetix) xTend app for the Mac tracks all the program executions and network activity 24 hours a day, and looking at two of my Macs shows they are busy little beavers even in the middle of the night.
The following chart shows the number of network events per hour on my Mac Studio. During the 3-4 am hour, my Mac Studio generated 1,000 connections.
Network events for Mac Studio
You may think, “Yeah, but your Mac Studio is plugged in. What about laptops without power?”
That is true. Plugged in Macs may be busier, but my MacBook Pro, unplugged, stuffed in my laptop bag, and under the desk, still generated about 300 connections during the 3-4 am hour.
Network events for MacBook Pro
In addition to network activity, programs come and go all night long too as can be seen in the chart in the lower-right corner of this screenshot. The program execution numbers are lower than network connections, but they are never zero.
xTend’s Statistics view