This really can't be emphasized enough.
It's very simple to see what's running. Right now on my OpenBSD system, when I do
ps ax |wc -l
the answer is 51. But that's misleading. Because: nsd 5 processes
ntpd 3 processes
nfsd 5 processes
Etc. So there are really very few processes, and they're all easily understood.In contrast, I just tried the same ps on my macOS Sierra laptop that I'm typing this on, and the count was 510. Ten times as many!!!
Mere mortals can't easily understand all of that.