Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

Apple menu, System Preferences, Internet Accounts, iCloud, iCloud Drive (then Options if iCloud Drive is on)

Update to 10.15.6 fixed the issue. It now can officially be marked as solved. Apple finally fixed. I would love to know what it was that was causing it though that they fixed.

I'm having the same issue. Either its accountsd that goes nutty or the mail app process.

This is making my less than yr old MBPr with maxed specs, down to a 30 mins or less laptop.

I've changed my mailbox fetching to manual. It works for now. What the **** though. Why has OS X become such a bloated mess?

For now, I'm following this thread, waiting for a fix.

The real drag here is that most mail clients for power users (I have 11 accounts - exchange, imap, yahoo, gmail, iCloud) is that these clients get bloated fast.

Mail on my 2011mbp (and on my iMac Pro when it was running Mojave) is solid as a rock. How can this upgrade hobble such an awesome app?

Anyway, I've tried Outlook, Postbox, Airmail, Thunderbird, and more but only Spark seems to handle it's duties well. Still get crazy high memory usage but it sips on the cpu so you don't really notice it.

This is a colossal waste of time...

Accountsd is the process. The private error it generates references an error with the address book.

apply the fix I posted. No data will be lost. You can back up the files if your unsure.

fairly positive it will fix the issue.

Exchange is definitely the issue. Well exchange plus a corrupted address book file. It’s the same commonality among everyone with this issue. Apply the fix I posted. Everything’s back to normal and you don’t have to disable any Apple services or your exchange accounts to accomplish it.

Yes address book. Look at my post. The address book is causing accountsd to spike. Just trace the errors in co sole and see for yourself. Apply the fix I posted. I can confirm without a doubt that it works.

@christian222 - Do you see any kernal errors like the ones I outlined here. This specific error is what pointed me to the addressbook being corrupted. and once I applied the fix this error and all the other accountsd private errors stopped.

On a similar note, I deleted the aforementioned all in caps keychain folder and restarted and left the 16 inch MacBook Pro open and running all night. And now in the morning Mail is still taking a reasonable amount of memory and fan not crazy. So I'm hopeful this may have done the trick. And @christian222, I still have kept the second user account and have not yet deleted it. But will keep it for now and if Mail maintains it's current much preferable state for a day or two, then I'll delete the 2nd user account and see what happens. Thanks all!

Yes I did. But things got so bad (for Mail/CPU consumption mostly - other bugs were largely manageable) that I reinstalled production Catalina. Basically got off the Beta program on OSX. I am now on 10.15.4. Maybe I am dreaming but it's feels that it's a bit better with production Catalina.

Overall: they really need to fix this Mail CPU bug. It's nuts. What's also nuts is how MS Outlook isn't seizing this opportunity to wrest control away from OSX Mail. Anyway it's digressing off the topic on this forum.

The problem is Catalina plus your particular Mac plus its infrastructure because mine and millions of others seem to work fine.

Sorry we could not pinpoint it by the usual methods.

So yes use another client but take the Mail accounts out first.

That's not quite correct. As I wrote earlier, i do have NO exchange accounts, also NO mail account using IMAP (good old pop/smtp instead)

What i DO have in common with all the other on here is: the problems started the very moment I had updated to Mac OS Catalina: accountsd process going berzerk as soon as I opened Apple Mail.

Deleting a folder in Application Suport, having the system replace it an d putting it back again surprisingly fixed the problem, but only for about a week, when everything was back to NEW-normal :/

My internet connection is via DSL cable so I cannot comment on whether the issue might be WiFi-related

The only fix, that I had shared here earlier, that worked for me so far is setting mail checks on 'manually'.

I'm not a tech guy, but isn't that already narrowing it down so precicely that the problem shouldn't be that hard to identify??

The moment that Apple Mail sends our accounts data, stored in systems settings & key chain, to remote mailservers in order to identify our acccouns there, somehow is so challenging for our new operating syste that all of a sudden that nasty 'accountsd' process bloats up to 400% (me for instance) – 600% (as I have read from others!). Apple programmers to the rescue PLEASE, we've supplied enough info I guess to get started solving this case

P.S.: why, by the way, has this thread/question/Problem/issue been marked "SOLVED"?

See subject of this thread. If it is not possible to find out why your Mail app spins the fans where mine is OK using sll the techniques offered earliet in this stsle thread then just eliminate the Mail app.

Yes App Tamer is junk. Most performance, cleaning or security apps written for Macs are junk.

Not saying Catalina has not been somewhere between annoying and catastrophic with some Macs but no need to poison them further.

Recommended analysis apps are Malwarebytes free and Etrecheck.

Not a fix, but I know how to exacerbate the scenario. Maybe it will help lead to a solution. Our fiber internet got cut and was working off of tethered phone internet for a couple days. So when I walked away, it would disconnect from my MBP. CPU and accountsd would go complete ham and crush CPU when Mail was open but no internet was available.

I don't know what it was trying to do when it couldn't find internet. But it would cause accountsd to eat up gigs of RAM waaaay faster than ever before.

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your reply and help!

This is a long lasting issue and as you can see in this discussion and there are many things people tried and some might help for a while. For me only using my Exchange and iCloud active solves is but as soon as I add one of the imap accounts it starts to go wrong. I have almost all calendars, notes, contacts, reminders in iCloud and some calendars in one Exchange account. Changing that seems not to solve it for me.

As an Apple consultant I believe I should use the Apple products and Exchange has been working fine in earlier versions macOS for me and works perfectly on the Apple App's on my iOS devices.

But I will migrate all my mail, agenda & contacts to Outlook on my Mac and keep my iOS devices as there are.

But still I believe Apple should fix this bug as I do want to continu using and supporting their products.

Rgds

Rob