fileproviderd is using up 300% system resources on 10.15 beta

I see fileproviderd is using up 300% system resources on 10.15 beta and I'm not sure how to troubleshoot. Fan is wining away on my MacBook pro and the battery drains in a few hours.

6 Answers

This bug is caused by iCloud-Drive. If you go to settings and disable iCloud-Drive, fileproviderd should stop using up the system resources. Hopefully iCloud-Drive will work as expected in the next beta.

As a very temporary fix you can kill the fileproviderd process. If you don't know how to do that you really shouldn't be running a developer preview release.

ps -ax | grep fileproviderd

then kill -9 the process id.

I'm on macOS catalina beta (build number 19A512f), here's a shotgun approach to fixing this problem, at least temporarily.

1. In Activity Monitor.app, sort processes by CPU usage, choose fileproviderd, iCloudDrive, and cloudd and force quit them.

2. Go to System Preferences > Apple id > iCloud and uncheck Optimize Mac Storage.

3. Still in System Preferences > Apple id > iCloud and uncheck iCloud Drive, keep a local copy or not (I chose not), normally it was already synced before then there is a copy of your data in the cloud so no worries.

4. Now when you no longer have iCloud Drive active, we are going to clear some caches, but before everything again in Activity Monitor.app force quit fileproviderd, iCloudDrive, and cloudd.

   Go to /Users/<your-username>/Library/Application Support (this directory is hidden, but you can access it with Finder > Go > Go to folder, after typing the start of each path you can type tab to autocomplete) in it you delete FileProvider folder.

   Then, go to /Users/<your-username>/Library/Caches and /Library/Caches and /System/Library/Caches and delete everything in them (don't worry it's just system and application caches).

5. Reboot

6. (optional) With the command line, remove the iCloud Drive (archive) folder in your home /Users/<your-username> with the command: sudo rm -rf /Users/<your-username>/iCloud\ Drive\ \(archive\), you can also move it someplace else to safe keep it with the mv command.

7. Verify that everything is working smooth and no process is out of control in Activity Monitor.app and go to System Preferences > Apple id > iCloud and re-check iCloud Drive, wait for it to enable itself properly.

8. Make sure System Preferences > Apple id > iCloud > Optimize Mac Storage remains unchecked.

9. That's it, your system should now be working smoothly without fileprovider canibalizing the CPU. I suggest you never, ever try to force download a folder, whenever you need a file it will automatically download it for you, but force downloading it may screw things up again, I advise for the moment to leave as is.

Make sure everything is ok in Activity Monitor.app and in Console.app > errors and warnings. Check that fileproviderd is no longer throwing up tons of errors per seconds.

Only thing that can still make fileproviderd eat up some CPU along with it is photoanalysisd which does facial recognition on all your photos, you can check up the advancement of this task in Photos.app > People.

Had the same problem on beta 1 and what helped me solved the problem besides turning off icloud drive was to uncheck "optimize mac storage".

This problem is resolved with the Catalina Update from July 3rd on my MacMini

Just putting in that I'm still seeing this issue on public beta 19A501i. Have tried to disable the optimise storage but that didnt fix it so my next move will be to turn off icloud full-stop. I have been putting this off though hoping that an updated beta might fix the issue firstly.