Hi, I get regular connectivity issues with huge waiting times for page loading in Chrome. Opening activity monitor I see something called ppm appendix agent taking considerable amounts of cpu, and when I force quit it the issues cease. Anyone know what this is, and why it is strangling my web access?
MacBook Pro (2020 and later)
I launched Activity Monitor on an Intel MacBook Air running macOS 11.6. No ppm_* process present. I then opened Google Chrome 94 to a Wikipedia page, and observed Activity Monitor. There is no searchable ppm_* process, and all Chrome-related processes show Google Chrome, or Google Chrome Helper (of which there are 6).
I now believe that something other than Google Chrome may be the source of that ppm_* process in your activity monitor. Reboot your Mac, and without launching anything. check Activity Monitor for that process. If it is present, something that you installed is using a Launch Daemon to start that process running and more detective work is necessary. If that ppm_* process is not present. Launch one application that was running when you observed this process previously and see if it appears, and so on.
If you have installed HoudahSpot (as a Spotlight replacement), or running any anti-virus or so-called cleaner (e.g. MacKeeper) applications, completely remove them per the vendor's instructions.
Probably a good question for the Chrome development team as they would specifically know what that internal Chrome agent is doing. Not an Apple problem.
I am not sure it is a specific Chrome feature, because I am also experiencing lagging on other applications, like Skype, messenger and Teams. Do you know for ceratin that it is a Chrome process?
It is a root function. As soon as it starts is has a significant energy impact, around to 60-70, and force quitting it makes everything work smoothly until it kicks in again
ppm appendix agent
