High CPU usage (Launchd) under Mojave

Hi all,

thought I'd post this question AND answer after 7 days of searching : I installed the latest security update + supplemental update on my MacBook Pro 14.6 and right afterwards my Mac was overheating with a constant 40-50% CPU usage. The culprits were always launchd or other associated daemons (launchservicesd, smd, etc.).

I tried a lot of things (reset SMC, disconnect iCloud, etc.) but none worked...then this post gave me a beautiful method :

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6616343?login=true

The idea : open your system.log file and look for errors or repeating lines. In my case, it was these 2 rows repeating up to 12 times per second (!) :

[02/07 12:48] <MyUserName> com.microsoft.OneDrive.35360.3FB4185F-D0BE-4B7C-B7E6-B9F1CF908FE5[17153]): Service exited with abnormal code: 1)

[02/07 12:48] <MyUserName>

Service "com.microsoft.OneDrive.35360.FD9B8ED3-37E3-40F7-9CEE-F95FE5EB3A67" tried to register for endpoint "com.microsoft.SkyDrive-Business1" already registered by owner: com.microsoft.OneDrive.35360.BC6A4D17-278D-445D-B108-2B658EC5991A

So basically, Microsoft's One Drive was attempting to re-register and was being refused - and of course Msft thought : hey, if we ever have a problem registering, let's try 10 to 15 times PER SECOND. And NEVER stop. Greaaaat idea.

So if you have high CPU, of course you can try some "simple" things (reset NVRAM, SMC, disconnect iCloud, run disk utility, etc.). But think about going to system.log and looking for keywords like "errors, abnormal, exit" etc... or read the last 50 lines and you should see who's misusing launchd. Note : launchd & co are daemons that can be triggered by all sorts of different apps, so it's not per se "iCloud" related.

Hope this can help some, and certainly help raise the above post from 2015 that was so effective !