Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

Thanks, I missed that approach in this long thread. I've applied it, let's see. It is not a problem of storage, my iCloud has 1.7 GB free.

However, GMail cannot be the cause of that issue because I figured the same behaviour on my MacBook Pro 13" (2018) but certainly do not have a GMail Account. The high CPU load even prevents my battery from charging if plugged in :-o

Even though my Mac was plugged in the whole day when I take it home it would tell me that battery is too low to run the computer. Really annoying! I have to quit Mail to charge my Mac during work.

After a day now, it only really quiets down after it checks for mail, sends, etc. But during any activity both Mail and accountsd will shoot up over 100%, 200%, ever 300%. So this did not really fix. It just makes it more manageable. Also, I did adjust Mail preference to check every minute as opposed to automatically.

Clearly, there is still a problem. It is also a memory leak. Before I did all of this accountsd was holding 1.7 GB of memory. After the force-quit it went down to about 15 MB and it is climbing again. Up to 280 MB already. Apple clearly needs to fix this, but they are too proud to do hot fixes. We are all probably stuck with this until Apple decides to include it in a regular update -- like with many other issues.

After days with this, the only way I can offer to deal with this is: quit Mail, open Activity Monitor, force quit accountsd, open Mail. This somehow clears it for a while. I also have Mail set to check/sync once a minute.

The FileVault suggestion, like just about everything else, is no good explanation.

A modern CPU can encrypt things on the fly without noticeable delays.

If the MacBook can handle a 4TB encrypted volume without noticeable delay for file I/O, Photos, etc. it’s hardly the reason it chokes on 16GB of IMAP mail data, unless Apple is doing something really stupid...

Thanks for the update. Next time CPU is high, bring up Activity Monitor and search for accountsd process. Then click the Memory tab and see how much memory it’s using. For me it was 2 to 3GB of memory, which would cause a lot of swapping and paging - which THEN would drive up CPU.

I’m testing a bunch of other things, like last night I killed accountsd and exited both Mac Mail and Outlook. Only calendar should be pulling data down (maybe Contacts). This morning the process was over 300MB already. Why? Conversely on my work mac running Mojave with Outlook, the process is 10Mb.

As I wrote before, seems exchange can be the culprit.

(OR gmail. buti do not have it...)

NOT address book.

Anyway Appel should fix it.

Now I do have installed beta... I CANNOT speak under under NDA .... but id someone has Apple dev account can post there in forum and we ca continue discussion there.

Also better for me BUT I now have to run activity monitor all the time and force kill accountsd as it just grows and grows (if left alone I think it would go forever).

Let's hope 10.15.4 brings an answer to this. I mean it's been months.

I'm working this case with Apple senior engineers now. I showed them showed them my blog with details, they had me do a few things and run/capture diagnostics. Will take 5 days for them to get back to me.

With the Apple engineer on the line, we unchecked all mail, calendars, everything under accounts. Restarted. Took a diagnostic snapshot. Then rechecked everything, restarted and took a diagnostic snapshot.

I'm glad you sent this because they wanted me to create a new admin-equivalent account on my Mac, and hook up the mail and see if accountsd grows there. Haven't done that yet.l

On my normal account, after about three days, accountsd is at 163MB and 5.9GB virtual memory. It's growing but slower.

yes. this happened with the first install of Catalina. It actually wiped years of emails for some reason. I had to do a restore from Google but there are still years worth of missing emails. That was strange because doing that did bring back others. I don't know why Google didn't restore everything. Anyway, I was ****** but I treated it like a house cleaning. I'm on an iMac Pro and mail (better since .3) if left running will bring my computer to a crawl. This is what I have to find a fix for.

FYI, I've tried other clients but they pale in comparison. Here's what I found:

1. airmail slows to an unusable crawl with large accounts.
2. Outlook does not play well with apple contacts and the lack of avatars is blah. also (annoying) it won't start from a unified inbox. Always the main account.
3. Spark is the best alternative so far but it is buggy as well and needs restarts often.
4. postbox is like airmail (with many large accounts). Clunky and slow no matter how you configure it.
5. Browser/Kiwi is good but that leaves my exchange accounts still needing a client if I want them all in one place.
6. email client like airmail/postbox
7. Thunderbird is actually descent but by the time you add extensions to make it look and work like something from the last 5 years it bogs down too.

Apple for years had gotten a bad rap but I never knew why. Up until Catalina it has been rock solid and did everything I needed it to. I never thought about my email. That is supposed to be the easiest thing your computer can tackle...

Dear all - I think I have accidentally stumbled onto a solution. As I've posted about before, when Mail started to suck all the CPU usage and brought things to a halt, I started to use other clients and had settled on Outlook. BUT - I started to have issues with Outlook where not from a CPU % perspective, but Outlook was using 8-10 gigs of Memory and was also slowing everything down on my 16 inch MacBook Pro. So I got in touch with Outlook for Mac's tech folks and he suggested that I set up another user account on my computer and set Outlook up in that to see if it behaves similar in a new user account. I did that but ironically couldn't create a new Outlook as MS wanted me to purchase a new license to do that. Which I didn't want to do. So I logged out and logged back into my main user account and first checked Outlook and it was down from 8-10 gigs of memory use in Activity Monitor down to just 1 gig. And now slowdown. So on a hunch I opened up Mail and sure enough, though it grabbed a bunch of CPU usage upon startup, it totally goes down after. I've had it open for close to an hour and have had no issues whatsoever. So for those of you like me who have been having these issues, I recommend creating a new user account and then logging back in. (in my case too the second user account I set as an admin account so didn't try it under Standard access). I'll keep trying this but other than creating the new user account and then logging back in, I have changed NO other settings. And the problem seems to have gone away. So for those of you having this issue, try the second user account and see if it helps like it appears to have done so for me. (So far at least) Thanks.

Since the last emails on this, and since I have a ticket open with Apple, I decided to add the new user, then log out and then do a full-on test by adding ALL of my accounts to both my Mojave Mac Mini and Catalina Mac Pro computers. Of course when you log out and back in, accountsd is small. After about 24 hours here's the specs:

Mojave -359MG with 4.68GB virtual

Catalina - 496MB - with 6.25GB virtual

So both pretty large but Catalina way larger on virtual. This new user attempt did slow down the growth but it's still an issue that appears to be somewhat part of Mojave as well. No issues on both other than the growth and swap use.

Still watching and waiting on Apple.

Okay so given all this, here's a permanent solution that appears to be innocuous. By the use of crontab, I'm going to kill the accountsd process every morning at 1:00am. Easy to install - here's the steps - and while it takes a little technical knowhow - not much. Also, use this at your own risk. I've not tested running this script forever. It doesn't seem to cause any issue but I'm not responsible either way.

• Open Terminal
• type

cd /tmp

• and press enter. That will take you to the tmp directory
• use vi to create this simple shell script in the /tmp directory - first launch vi by typing:

vi kill_accountsd.sh

• Go into insert mode by type the letter i
• Copy and past the below text into vi

echo "$(date) - Starting accountsd kill process..." >> /tmp/kill_accountsd.out

killall -9 accountsd

echo "Killed..." >> /tmp/kill_accountsd.out

• Save and exit vi by pressing escape and then typing colon and wq! - in other words, type

:wq!

• and press enter. That will create the shell script in your tmp directory. You can see that it's there by typing:

ls -ltr kill*

• Change the shell script to executable by typing:

chmod a+x kill_accountsd.sh

* Okay now you have an executable script in your tmp directly. Now we need to install into cron. Cron is just a process that wakes up whenever you tell it to and runs commands (usually a shell script, etc.). At the prompt type:

crontab -e

• You'll be take to a vi session where you can edit the various cron commands. This is very much like using vi (in fact it is) so type the letter i to insert, and then you'll want to enter this rather cryptic line:
• 
  

5 1 * * * . /tmp/kill_accountsd.sh

• There's a space between each number and asterisk AND a space between the period and the /tmp. What this is saying is, wake up every morning at 1:05am and run this script.

• Hit the escape and save by typing:

:wq!

And that's it. The script will be launched every morning at 1:05am and it will kill the accountsd process and write out what it did to a log in the /tmp directory called "kill_accountsd.out". If you're so inclined after doing this, the next day bring up terminal, change to the /tmp directory and type:

cat kill_accountsd.out

And it will show you hopefully that it awakened and killed the process, which restarts automatically anyway. I'm going to try this on both of my macs and keep it running for a while.

By the way, to stop this from running, edit your crontab using the 'crontab -e' command above and navigate to the line using your arrow keys (do not press 'i') and type 'dd' and it will delete the line. Or you navigate to the start of that line, press 'i' and enter a pound side at the first character '#' and that comments out the line. Then save with ':wq!' and you're good.

Let me know if anyone else does this and how it turns out. Not a great fix but stops the bleeding.

This isn't fixed and not how it's supposed to be. Mail is unusable when 'accountsd' process spins above 300%. I've seen as high as 450% with Mail at 200%. I don't think this is a Mail issue, but how Exchange is being implemented. With Gmail it's how IMAP is being used. These technologies sync across the server account (in the cloud- all email is in the cloud BTW) and across your devices. This is an active push process from device to server, and from server to devices— to keep all devices in sync.

It normally works great– iCloud email is unaffected for example, and regular IMAP email is working fine too... this issue is narrowed to Gmail and Exchange.