bluetoothd taking up high CPU% and causing trackpad to behave poorly

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bluetoothd taking up high CPU% and causing trackpad to behave poorly

I have a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017) running MacOS Catalina Version 10.15.5 (19F101). When I first boot up my machine, everything works fine and bluetoothd appears to take up a reasonable amount of CPU%. However, over time, the amount of CPU bluetoothd uses steadily climbs until it's up over 50%. I notice when this happens because my Magic Trackpad starts behaving poorly, double clicking when I single click and just generally not responding normally.

The only Bluetooth devices I have connected to the Mac are an Apple Magic Trackpad A1535 and Apple Magic Keyboard A1644.

I have tried resetting the SMC and PRAM repeatedly and I have changed out the keyboard and trackpad for different units of the same model. None of that has made a difference. I have tried resetting the Bluetooth controller from the Bluetooth debug menu and that also seems to have no effect.

The only solution I have found is to reboot the computer, after which things go back to normal for a while until I notice the trackpad acting up and check Activity Monitor to see that the CPU% for bluetoothd is again very high. This is very inconvenient as it requires me to completely interrupt my workflow.

Anyone else having this problem? Suggested remedies? Apple, do you have a fix for this?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 17, 2020 1:38 PM

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Answer 1

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siskenderian Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 21, 2020 5:30 PM in response to Teddy_B

Teddy, I was actually able to reach Apple Support and they suggested that because the bluetoothd process was initiated by the root user, my best course of action was to reinstall macOS. That turned out to be not as big a deal as it might seem, because macOS Recovery allowed me to reinstall the OS without wiping my drive.

I followed the instructions in this article: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

Since I reinstalled the OS, bluetoothd seems to be behaving much more normally and I have not experienced the bad behavior from my Magic Trackpad.

Fingers crossed that solves it for good.

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Answer 2

chris_g1

Community Specialist

Jul 22, 2020 6:03 AM in response to siskenderian

Hi there siskenderian,

Thanks for replying back here to share how you resolved the issue. We appreciate it!

Best wishes.

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Answer 3

siskenderian Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 27, 2020 10:29 AM in response to chris_g1

A quick update. It's been almost a week and bluetoothd is behaving itself, taking up less than 1% of CPU.

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Answer 4

Teddy_B

Community Specialist

Jul 21, 2020 1:36 PM in response to siskenderian

G'day siskenderian,

Thanks for the post. We know it's important to ensure your Mac is operating as expected. It looks like you see unexpectedly high usage in Activity Monitor relating to Bluetooth processes. We'll be glad to see how we can help.

You've done some excellent troubleshooting so far. To narrow this down further, we recommend testing the issue in a new user account, and in safe mode. This will tell you if the issue is system-wide or user-specific, and will also help to rule out certain software causes. Here are the steps:

How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac

How to use safe mode on your Mac

Let us know if you're able to replicate this behavior in both safe mode and in the newly-created administrator account. Those will help determine your next best steps.

Have a good day.

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bluetoothd taking up high CPU% and causing trackpad to behave poorly

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