Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

I've had a BIG turn-around on this issue after upgrading to macOS 10.15.3. It will spike for a second here and there but not more 747 jet engine CPU fan.

As I type this, I did notice that accountsd is taking up over 700 MB of Memory, and hasn't been rebooted in awhile. No clue if that high, normal, or what. I just know my computer doesn't slow to a crawl any more...

Hi nmehtalumen, after testing many and having 8 email accounts, Exchange and Gmail, I ended up using Microsoft Outlook. Seems to be very consistent and very light compared to others. The process is somewhat different but I can rely on it.

Good luck!

(I believe there will be a MacOS update this coming Tuesday, maybe we can all test it...)

Thank you!

Hi folks.

Since 10.15.4 update I have sensible accountsd and mail processor usage for 2.5 days uptime now.

I'm not going to call it fixed until it's behaved itself for a bit longer and I see someone else has updated and got no joy but to reiterate, I have lots of gmail accounts and an old hotmail account and have removed and re-added all of these in trying to resolve this before the update to 10.15.4 and now appears to be behaving better than at anytime since Catalina.

Thank you!

I have already tried Spark, Airmail, Thunderbird, Outlook, CanaryMail, Postbox, BlueBox, etc.

So far, all of them have shortcomings that affect my workflow. The only solution I have found so far is MailMate. I think I am switching to this client permanently.

Wow - so far this is looking promising. I have 8 accounts in Mail and in my main account it drives memory utilization (in accountsd process) thru the roof, approaching 1GB. Just created a test account, logged into it, added a single mail account. Then logged out of it and into my regular account. So far accountsd is 31Mb and holding.

But I've been a sucker for this before, so I'll have to see if by the end of the day that maintains.

Good idea -!

Let me add one thing that also made a difference for me: Deleting the above mentioned keychain folder worked, but after restarting I noticed that my iCloud wanted me to re-log in. As soon as I did that, it enabled Keychain as an iCloud service which had been turned off since rebooting after deleting the above mentioned keychain folder. Once the Keychain service was enabled, iCloud re-synced all of my keychains again and almost immediately Mail and Accountsd freaked out. So...I turned off the Keychain service, clicked delete on my Mac, and then deleted the above mentioned keychain folder. After that I restarted, logged back into the iCloud which this time did not enable Keychain service, and viola...no issues since. We shall see if this lasts.

This is actually very helpful and helps a lot to control the resources of the accountsd process.

I tried it using only IMAP accounts and worked perfectly. Then I became ambitious and decided to stop the access to some accounts using IMAP and switched them back to Exchange and the magic was gone. Accountsd became crazy again.

Those for whom my fix above doesn't work: until Apple finally addresses this problem you may want to set the Check-Mail-intervals to 'Manually'. This way it'll only last for a few seconds instead of blocking your mac continually...

Hi peter_watt!

I have already posted my configuration on this thread. My screenshot was to answer your question that it cannot be possible because your computer is not doing that. I am not lying.

I have a MacBook Pro 2018 with 32 GB of RAM that with Mojave was fine checking emails. On Catalina, Mail is a mess. Under no circumstance, Mail should use that amount of CPU + accountsd. It does not make any sense. Especially, because I have another Mac with MacOS Sierra from 2010, a White MacBook that perfectly handle all these emails without choking the computer.

I have also tried the same configuration on Spark, Outlook, MailMate, CanaryMail, Thunderbird... None of those programs make this mess just checking emails.

I have 16 Gmail accounts, 1 hotmail, 1 yahoo, 2 Exchange, 1 iCloud. It is not too much for the old White MacBook with an old Core 2 Duo.

Any help is appreciated.

P.S.

By the way, so far, the problem seems to be connected with Exchange accounts. When accessing the same accounts using IMAP only, the processor spikes is high (About 100%) but it is manageable. Once I activate the same accounts using Exchange protocol instead (And disabling IMAP of course), the processor, fans and everything go to the roof.

I just spent the whole afternoon doing the new account thing.

I created a new user, and I was adding account by account and checking the consumption. By the time I entered the last one, more than 400% of usage in Mail and accountsd over 200%. So, this is not the answer.

I am convinced that the problem is Catalina. So far, the only solution I have found is switch to another email client and wait until Apple gives some priority to Mac and decides to fix Mail.

Based on what I'm seeing other people post, and my own experience of it (not too extreme a mail setup: 3 exchange accounts, 2 imaps, whatever iCloud uses), here's my summary:

1. The problem is in Catalina, as previous/other macOS versions don't seem to have the problem.
2. The problem seems to be linked to the Exchange accounts.
3. The problem seems to be triggered by interruptions to IP connectivity. There may be other causes (enabling/disabling my VPN seems to do it, sometimes).
4. The problem can be temporarily resolved by a number of ways: disabling the Exchange accounts, disabling the IMAP accounts (worked for me at least), creating a new user account, restarting, etc. But it always seems to come back.
5. A permanent fix has not been clearly identified (that I've seen).

Based on the above, and having encountered a problem like this on a SW project I was involved in, my guess is that there is some kind of bug in the error handling code associated with the Exchange interface. As in, there is an error in the connection, and accountsd goes haywire. The various temporary solutions work by breaking the trap that accountsd gets caught in, but when the error occurs again, it goes nuts again.

The good news to those suffering the problem: You ain't alone, and there are temporary fixes. The bad news: It's a subtle problem, and the root cause is not clearly identified.

I will check in with my Senior Advisor but he went silent on me. I too have a MBP 16" and the only way I've been able to accept working is to set my Mail to MANUALLY under the "Check for new messages" under the GENERAL pane in Mail PREFERENCES. Ironically some of the mail still comes in automatically anyway and I'm just now in the habit of checking GET NEW MAIL maybe every 15-20 min in amidst my work flow. But doing this has totally made me MBP "workable" in that it doesn't slow down. Would love to move it back to checking every minute but that's the process that kills it for me. So until there's another solution, this one has. been an acceptable sacrifice for me.

Hi vip4lyf, I have been testing this since last December and found my MBP16" works fine with my Exchange account disabled and the rest on (iCloud and multiple map accounts) but I have it now working for several day's with only my three Exchange accounts on and it is still working fine. I have tried many many many combinations but whatever combi I use it will start to go wrong when I have 5 or email accounts. So for me it's more the number of email accounts than the type of accounts. But that might be different for others.

I will also test disabling the Address book in iCloud as I still use that. It feels to me that it is not the issue as it's alway's de accounts and mail applications that take high cpu load. But I will try it starting tomorrow.

And I do agree with you that we do need Apple to look into this as it makes Apple mail unusable.

The only way I've found to keep my email in Mac Mail and have the computer usable is to kill the accountsd process each morning at 2am via a cron job. Doing that on my Macbook Pro means that the size of the process grows to about 800MB too 900MB. That's with 8 mail accounts with associated contacts, some Exchange, some Google, one Yahoo, one iCloud.

This is NOT a fix, but gave me relief. The ticket I opened with Apple has gone dark. I can't get them to respond to me. I called again last week and "left a message". No response. Very frustrating.

Also opened a ticket regarding my email accounts shuffling in order randomly. I created a script that immediately fixes that, but can't explain what external process is messing with the plist that causes this.

My backups are taking way longer than before Catalina.

My iCloud drive often doesn't synch until I reboot my Macbook.

Catalina is turning out to be a terrible release.

After installing the supplemental update (I think I read it addressed a memory leak) I've had mail running 1 gmail account for 2 days. So far accountsd is under 60mb. I'll let it run for a week and see if this is finally addressed. After that I'll add 1 account at a time and wait and watch activity monitor.

Crossing my fingers!