mediaanalysisd taking up high amounts of CPU in Catalina

Question

mediaanalysisd taking up high amounts of CPU in Catalina

My research on this daemon was that it had to do with Photos searching my library for faces. That's fine, and so I let it run for a few days. But it has been weeks now and it is still running, taking up 95% of my CPU at times, and Photos itself reports that it has processed all my photos.

mediaanalysisd grinds my system to a halt. Everything is sluggish. Imagine windows only opening and closing and UI elements only appearing and disappearing every other second. This is clearly a bug and is not working as intended, especially because Photos says it has concluded its face-searching.

I have read complaints about issues like these going back several macOS versions. At one point someone had success in disabling the daemon by deleting the plist file. Well Apple seems to have fixed the fix by making the plist file for mediaanalysisd unable to be deleted.

If anyone has found a way to kill this daemon for good, I'm ready to give up face analysis if I have to in order to get my computer working properly again.

Mac mini, 10.15

Posted on Nov 18, 2019 3:26 AM

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Answer 1

chris_g1

Community Specialist

Nov 20, 2019 6:44 PM in response to David Portela

Hi David Portela,

Thank you for using the Apple Support Communities! I understand your Mac is running more slowly and you've noticed a certain process using up a larger mount of CPU. I'd like to explore this further.

Outside of the process that appears to be taking up a larger amount of CPU, I would recommend running through these steps related to performance concerns: If your Mac runs slowly - Apple Support.

If the performance concern continues after following each step in the above article, and you get to the last step about using Activity Monitor, I'd like you test a new user account next. This will help isolate if this is a user-specific issue, or a system-wide issue. Here’s how: How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac - Apple Support. Based on the results in the new user, you could continue to the section titled 'If the issue doesn't happen in the other account' or 'If the issue happens in the other account' to continue troubleshooting.

Keep me posted on the results.

Regards.

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mediaanalysisd taking up high amounts of CPU in Catalina

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