Accountsd Mac cpu is high

Hi!

I had the same issue and i contacted apple support via phone.

The guy was very sweet and helped a lot.

What he recommended was to remove the apple ID (and other internet accounts) and add them via safe boot (turn off your mac then press left shift and power button, keep holding shift but releasing the power button until your login screen appears). Then just add your accounts in the system preferences --> internet accounts AND apple ID (in the apple ID icon)

Hope it helps :)

P.s: Apparently it was a processes conflict

For me the issue with the accountsd on high CPU clearly started after the update to 10.15.7. After resetting the non-volatile memory (Shut down your Mac, then turn it on and immediately press and hold these four keys together: Option, Command, P, and R. You can release the keys after about 20 seconds, during which your Mac might appear to restart.) solved the problem for a few days, but today the issue re-appeared. Definitely a bug since the latest MacOS update.

I am working on a iMac 27" 8 core. As you can see in the screenshot, all CPU's are running hot. Support from Apple is required. Thanks.

I've had the same issue a couple of times over the past week. Signing my Apple ID out and rebooting has fixed it, but it has come back again later. First time things were good for a few days, the next few times the problem came back immediately after signing in again with my Apple ID.

It think the cause has been the recent outages that Microsoft has had with their Exchange servers worldwide over the past week or so - my having problems have coincided with those outages. Perhaps the Mac has been getting an unexpected response from Microsoft's servers during these outages, and Apple has a problem with their error handling code?

EDIT to my previous message:

The issue is not permanently fixed by using OnyX. The only solution I see is to log out of Apple ID and not log back in again.

If you want to log back in, after you do so you can go to "~/Library/Accounts" and rename Accounts4.sqlite to something like

Accounts4.sqlite.backup

This solves the issue but it could break iCloud sync or do strange things with your iCloud Drive so I do not suggest to do that.

I think it's better to live without Apple ID until Apple fixes the issue than to take the risk.

Problem not limited to 10.15.7.... one of the devices in our company under 10.15.6 had exactly same symptoms.

Could be related to MS Exchange accounts on the devices, but no evidence yet. Two newly installed OSX devices on 10.15.7 without an active icloud account had no problems.

Happy it worked for you, but for me the problem with accountsd going crazy started after i had 10.15.7 already installed. It was not because of the update, though. The problem appeared after I accepted switching iCloud security to 2FA on iPhone. After that, macOS wanted me a fresh login for iCloud services (whicht makes sense, security-wise) but macOS got stuck - it never accepted my new login, there seems to be some bug in the routine. And accountsd started and I could only continue working (I need this machine for work) when I logged out all iCloud services. I hope for some update, because this bug is really annoying (I need iCloud for work too!)

After combo update and deleting keychains didn't work on my iMac, I tried this workflow - and it worked:

1. uncheck all iCloud Services and log out of Apple ID (keep all data, when asked)
2. remove ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.accountsd
3. rename ~/Library/Accounts to ~/Library/Acccounts_old (this forces the System to create a new folder and db after reboot)
4. reboot Mac
5. Log in to Apple ID and reactivate every service step by step, keep an eye on the activity monitor
6. reinstall all other internet accounts

My accountsd is now <100%

Just because this problem went away so easily for you doesn‘t mean there ist no problem for others. For me logging out of iCloud fixed the problem too, but when I logged in 24hours later (after two restarts) the brandnew Macbook was unusable again. And I need iCloud for work

Hi all,

I have the same recurring issue on an iMac (Retina 5k, 27-inch, 2017) with macOS Catalina V10.15.7.

I have attempted all solutions on this page:

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/accountsd/

But no avail.

Symptoms, see screenshot. The Mac consumes a lot of energy and is very sluggish, and more often than not Safari decides to fully freeze (happened twice during to submit this ticket).

Hope a resolve comes for this.

If you use Little Snitch network monitor (you probably should) you can use that to deny the commerce process network access. At least for me this seems to have solved the problem, commerce is no longer downloads stuff continuously and this seems to have fixed whatever was going wrong with accountsd as well.

Has worked to keep the problem away since Oct 2 for me, without this Onyx tool (whatever that is supposed to do?), renaming/removing any system files, killing any processes or changing any iCloud settings.

Haven't encountered any other problems with this, but I'm guessing if I want to purchase something via the App Store I may need to allow commerce network access again.

In my case, I tried all the solutions suggested here and none worked—even temporarily. So I formatted and installed everything from scratch and only copied documents, photos, music, etc. I didn’t restore any settings, preferences, or other system files.

Since then all has been good.

I also wanted to point out that my accountsd issue started after using boot camp. So now I don’t bit into Windows anymore...

Excellent! Thanks for posting back your results.

The same happened here just after the update to 10.15.7

Logging out and back again of Apple ID seems to solve the problem

I now also reinstalled the combo update for catalina and that solved the issue on my Mac Mini 2018

i've kill -9 the commerce process and seem that also accountsd process back to 17% ... look like a bug ...