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Accountsd: How to Fix High CPU Usage on Mac

nickjd331 said:
I've had the same happen on multiple occasions, and I have yet to update to 10.15.7.
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The least problematical release of Catalina so far was 10.15.4. Catalina 10.15.5 broke firmlinks, 10.15.6 broke virtualization apps, 10.15.7 seems to have broken iCloud.
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Internet Enzyme said:
This type of crap is so pervasive in macOS. . . Some stupid process like “photolibraryd” or something will just toss a plurality of your CPU into a bottomless pit
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Well, no one should use Photos.app anyway, so that one is easy to fix. Keeping your pictures in some opaque database... yerch.
 
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posguy99 said:
The least problematical release of Catalina so far was 10.15.4. Catalina 10.15.5 broke firmlinks, 10.15.6 broke virtualization apps, 10.15.7 seems to have broken iCloud.
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Well, no one should use Photos.app anyway, so that one is easy to fix. Keeping your pictures in some opaque database... yerch.
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What do you recommend to replace photos.app?
 
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Actually, I forgot that even Mojave’s not immune to being Appled.

The latest security update from this past month, has made it so any screen saver that uses photos, your own or the ones provided by Apple, locks up the system for nearly a minute whenever the screensaver starts.

Only workaround is to chose a screensaver without photos.
 
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Sticking with Snow Leop... er, Mojave. For the foreseeable future. Not that it's great, but it beats the alternative.
 
Some stupid process like “photolibraryd” or something will just toss a plurality of your CPU into a bottomless pit
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Oh yes, I really hate this one. There really should be some way to disable this completely or at least limit it to one library only...

It is Apple of our times: It barely works instead of it just works. It seems, that Apple has a 80% is enough attitude regarding software quality.
 
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ruslansv said:
"Small number of users" is a standard issue corporate PR line meaning "it's a common bug we didn't test for"
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And at times it's really that too (in addition to potentially being something that wasn't experienced in testing even if it was something that was tested for, or was encountered but hasn't gotten fixed yet while the release was still approved higher up for whatever reason).
 
You know, I wonder if the recent uptick isn't because of 10.15.7, but because exchange online has been down a lot this week - is this happening to people without exchange accounts too?
 
FYI using internal audio causes coreaudiosd to go from about 2% CPU usage while playing externally through the mic jack, to over 6% when using the internal speakers. I have a 2020 iMac. Anyone wishing to squeeze out every bit of performance may wish to consider external audio.
 
Had this issue after upgrading my iMac from Mojave to Catalina .7. My suspicion is that the problem had something to do with an outage of some iCloud services which coincided with the update.

Logging out of all accounts, rebooting, and then loging in again somehow solved the problem.

Of course accountsd should not go haywire because of problems with the iCloud backend.
 
I assume you can "kill" this process either in Activity Monitor or via kill terminal command.
 
this happened to me and drained my battery 20% in a matter of minutes with the fan running in overdrive. Rebooting didn't fix it. What did fix it for me was to turn wifi off, wait a few minutes and turn it back on again.
 
For me the solution that has worked has been to stop using mail.app altogether and switching to Outlook.

Something something many email accounts (some exchange) something something.
 
Is anyone else tired of Apple naming their OS’s after places in California, like that’s the only place in the world.

I think they should start naming them after things that float.
 
I have the problem intermittently. So far hard resetting my iMac and disconnecting power did the trick. I called Apple support, and got immediately transferred to a specialist. His words: ‘known issue, hoping for a hotfix’. So Apple definitely knows about this one!
 
The heading suggests a solution... as it suggests a real big widespread issue.
Oh.. maybe it is a rumor ?
 
I've been dealing with this issue since I upgraded to Catalina. What I have found is that the accountsd process starts to use more and more RAM. When it gets to a point where its using a GB or so then it starts to really slow down the machine. Basically, it appears to have a memory leak of some sort. So rebooting fixes the symptoms (till it leaks enough). Signing out and in to iCloud solves the symptoms (till it leaks enoough). Etc. I've had to just watch and see when it occurs and sudo kill -9 <pid> on the accountsd process and then it gets better until it gets worse again. Been dealing with this issue for about a year now. It got better under 10.15.6. I just upgraded to .7 today so I'll see what happens now.
 
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Sure, it must be a baseless rumour because random 100% CPU/GPU usage has never happened before in any version of macOS. And we all know that only 40 people experience it because there is no way that there are e.g. 40000 other people that have it but do not know much about computers or do not care about expressing things in public.

Or maybe it exists but it is a feature ?
 
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this problem of an overactive cpu is interesting but tiring to the people who experience it.

what the macrumors article does NOT do a good about at al (as usual) l, is to mention that if your machine has a symptom of "high CPU", the problem could be completely something else.

here is the same issue, but caused by a different file run amok.

this solution DOES work. and i bet this "high CPU usage" remedy fixes more machines than the macrumors one.
this was needed to do on my 2018 MacBook Air running Catalina. it worked.

it involves TrustedPeersHelper
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250775689
 
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I went to do my DJ livestream w/ music videos on twitch on Monday and this nabbed me. I’m on the latest MacBook Pro maxed out (64 GB / 8 core / 5600mbasically everything except the hard drive- mine is a 4TB model).

The stream didn’t lag, but I normally sat around 40% total CPU usage during the stream. Obviously the computer sat at 100% for the hour I was on. No dropped frames- but my overhead camera on my DJ controller was glitching terribly. I use GPU acceleration for x264 encoding on my 5600m

I did the fix after some research about accountsd (putting Macintosh HD in the ‘prevent spotlight from indexing’ window and then removing it and letting the computer re-index over almost 2 days)

Curiously, on a live stream after the indexing completed, it wasn’t going over 20% no matter how hard I stressed the machine. So I’ll take the win, but come on Apple, this is ridiculous.
 
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