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Well, I don't know exactly what I should ask, but I'm trying to fix that I've had kernel_task at 100-500% of CPU for most of the past week, bringing everything to a halt.

I've looked at this thread: How to investigate high kernel task memory usage?, which gave lots of excellent things to try.

I've gotten rid of various things I don't seem to need, like startup items for apps I'm not using. And I cautiously try to disable some services I don't seem to need, like gamed. But it isn't getting better. Snapshot of Activity Monitor:

activity

And, when I look at the console, it seems that either passd, CommCenter, or mapspushd are doing this same thing over and over, many times per second:

console

Little Snitch doesn't seem to indicate any outgoing activity from this, but obviously something is trying to connect with something, and I'm not sure how to find out what.

This is on Sierra on a 2015MBP.

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Flemming Funch
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  • First thing I'd try is disabling Little Snitch temporarily. Just in case it is inadvertently blocking something important. – Alistair McMillan Feb 25 '17 at 19:02
  • Well, I did that. And, as I was getting really frustrated, I decided to do a reinstall of the core system, from the Recovery partition. It finishes, but afterwards gets stuck on logging me in, even in safe mode. I can, however, get SSH access from elsewhere and see that IDSKeychainSyncingProxy, mapspushd, and passd each use around 100% of CPU. And apparently are stuck somehow. – Flemming Funch Feb 26 '17 at 18:28
  • Oh, and CommCenter too. If I kill all of those processes remotely, the login goes through and the load drops. – Flemming Funch Feb 26 '17 at 19:14
  • Something on your Mac is preventing network connection from being made or failing in an expected way. This seems to be what is driving your Mac nuts. It could be a hardware or software problem. If you run EtreCheck on your Mac and post the results to a Gist then link it here it might help us identify the problem. – Alistair McMillan Feb 27 '17 at 16:05
  • Good idea. Here's my EtreCheck: https://gist.github.com/ffunch/2047f486a6d1c15938b03a6824375076 Which seems to say that everything is fine. The overall system load is really good now, after the Sierra reinstall. But I notice that several things that need to sync with something in the cloud are failing, like EverNote or TheBrain. Little Snitch has network filter off. – Flemming Funch Feb 28 '17 at 01:43
  • Actually, strike that. I was on a VPN. When I turned that off, those cloud syncs started working. Which maybe is a clue. I believe I had my high load problem even when not on VPN, but there might be some relation. – Flemming Funch Feb 28 '17 at 02:05
  • Looking at that output you seem to have more than one piece of VPN software installed. If you are still having issues I'd remove all of them entirely (making sure to remove all related preference, cache, etc files), then re-install them one at a time until the problem presents again. – Alistair McMillan Mar 03 '17 at 23:02

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