what does process TRIALD do — and why so many files in Users/user/library?

1 - Suggest restarting in Safe Mode. This will perform a Disk Repair, clear cache files and only load Apple Software, extensions and fonts. The boot up will be slow and can take some time - Normal.

2 - Does the issue present in this mode ?

3 - If not - there could be something in the main User Account playing up. To further isolate this - Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac. Then log out of the Main User account and log into the dummy account and test again if the issue persists.

4 - If the issue is present in the dummy account - then, this appears to be a System Wide issue on the computer.

5 - Suggest downloading the Application Etrecheck directly from a well Respected ASC Contributor. And Safe to use.

The application is free or paid from added features. 

Run the application with Full Disc Access ( Security & Privacy - Full Disc Access ).

It will take a Snap Shot -  both the hardware and software. And we can really see what is happening on this computer.

 The Report will Not Reveal Any Personal Information. 

Post back the Full Report - copy and paste - using the Additional Text Icon ( 3rd Icon to last )

We can have a look at the report for possible issues and may have possible suggestions to resolve the issues.

Any Third Party Applications that will interfere with the normal operation of the OS, alter, modify, remove or delete or attempt to do so is an invitation for disaster and may require a Reinstallation of the OS in-order to replace any modified, altered, removed or corrupted elements of the OS this software has inflected on this computer 

Any of the below should be removed as per Developers Instructions 

This includes AntiVirus, Disk Cleaners, Disk Optimizes, UnInstaller etc.

This will include CleanMyMac , This will include BitDefender , 

This will included Norton Antivirus , Sophos Av Software

Intego AntiVirus, McAfee, MacKeeper, Avast AntiVirus

Ad Guard, Webroot

The The Built in Security  is all that is required.

Pure guess work here and concede to more Learned Contributor(s) on this one.

Yes, there seems to be a new Folder called "Trial " in User Library introduced in Monterey 12.3.

AFAIK - it was not present in Monterey 12.2.1 when I ran by CCC Clone but is present in 12.3

As to the exact nature and functionally of this new " Trail " in Library - that is outside of my skill set.

On my two M1 Computers - it does not interfere or degrade the overall performance of either machine.

Thanks for the additional data point.

The presentation was seemingly random here too. After a reboot it would take about a day to present, and triald would just be pegging one CPU core at 100% for hours on end once it presented. Inspecting it with:

log stream --level info --predicate 'process == "triald"'

Showed it just looping through the same thing over and over. Looking at file opens and such with:

sudo fs_usage

Showed it touching Siri-related things in ~/Library/Trial. While triald was in this state, I enabled Siri, and the issue went away. It hasn't occurred since.

Prior to enabling Siri, I had played around with deleting ~/Library/Trial, setting it to 000 permissions, and even symlinking it to /dev/null, but the first only worked for a period of time, and the latter two options seemed way too dirty of a hack. Likewise it doesn't seem possible to unload the LaunchAgent unless you disable SIP, which I don't want to do.

The process seems to go crazy for me when my Mac is wrestling with discovering my two monitors every morning when I start my day. CPU consumption will drive near saturation on all cores for 10 minutes or so. During this time the memory seems unaffected. Once the Mac successfully figures out that it has two ViewSonic monitors attached, the Triald process settles down a bit, but will still consume large percentage of CPU until I kill it.

bradleyfrommaine wrote:

Actually natenate is more in focus on this, Siri and some A/B algorithm, perhaps. We're still not at the bottom of it. The process triald is building a huge database complex from what is on my disk. Hence, my question. And no, "communicates with a lot of processes" does not answer the question. Just like "communicates with a lot of people" does not answer the question, what is Alex Jones up to?

I would suggest to look through some preferences—and try turning off/disabling some options and see if there is any impact here

>System Preferences>Security&Privacy>Privacy

Go down the list:

Share analytics information from your Mac with Apple - Apple Support

Have you talked to Apple Support about your ongoing issue:

Get Support

bradleyfrommaine wrote:

I've not been able to find any info on this daemon process. On my 2019 MacBook Pro with Monterey 12.3, triald pegs in with the eighth highest overall CPU usage. And then there's the files. In my user library, the folder "trial" contains over 173 THOUSAND files/items. And because of disk allocation, the 62 MB of these data take up 666.7 MB of disk space.

I've killed the process and moved the trial folder to the trash. The daemon starts right back up, or no later than a reboot, and the re-initialized folder starts out with about 2 MB of disk space allocated. But after a couple of days, it's right back to over 172,000 files/items and varies a bit from there.

A second, utility, user on this machine with an overall total of about 76 MB of files has a much smaller trial folder in its user library with about 4 MB of data for 138 items.

So. Does anyone know the purpose/function of this daemon? Thanks.

And what issue are you having independent of this file count and folder size in your user account—

what makes you drill down here on triald as an issue?

You can try a Safeboot, then reboot as normal

SafeBoot https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

you can try re-installing the macOS on top of your existing macOS to sort anomalies

How to reinstall macOS

Recovery (both M1 and Intel) — https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

I have followed all the conversations here about ~/Library/Trial files that cannot be suppressed and have tried safe boot, launchctl, deleting the plist, etc. Finally I stumbled upon a solution that has at least for the last 2 days prevented the writing of the hundreds of thousands and hundreds of megabytes of data.

1. empty ~/Library/Trial
2. remove all access permissions from it as root
3. (optional step) curse Apple for experimenting with my machine

bradleyfrommaine wrote:

I have tried re-installing MacOS 12.3. I have just tried Safeboot.... No effect in this case.

There's almost no info out there on triald.

... what this process is doing on my Mac with 173 thousand files and almost two thirds of a gig of disk space.

< triald > is responsible for a large amount of communication in the macOS— you can see more from the triald.plist

/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.triald.plist 

bradleyfrommaine wrote:

...triald pegs in with the eighth highest overall CPU usage.

<snip>

Does anyone know the purpose/function of this daemon?

It seems the original question was answered...

It is not advised to delete directories you know nothing about...as a word of caution.

Maybe this is why Apple hides the user Library by default 😉

If you are trying to drill down on this as an issue I would start by investigating your 7 highest processes in your Activity Monitor....that would be a separate posting.

I just noticed in iStat Menus that 25% of overall CPU cores is taken by triald on my MBP 14 M1 Pro. I noticed as it got red all the way at the menu bar icon. And it is more than 20 mins and it does not go away. I think it is related to upgrade to 12.3. So, it takes CPU and power for no apparent reason, looks like some kind of bug. There was no such nonsense process in the past.

Those who have noticed excessive CPU usage from triald that doesn't seem to go away on macOS 12.3, do you have Siri disabled? Poking around ~/Library/Trial it seems largely Siri-related, and I've only seen this behavior on Macs that have Siri disabled.

I enabled Siri on an affected Mac, and the behavior seems to have gone away, but it's probably too soon to tell.

Yeah triald appears to do A/B stuff with Siri. The test case I'm looking for is someone who is affected by the excess triald CPU issue, whether they have Siri disabled, and whether enabling it appears to resolve the issue. I don't expect the inverse test case to immediately produce the issue, since triald is not constantly running A/B tests.

Based on the behavior on this Mac here, I suspect triald tries to run A/B tests against Siri data even it's disabled, fails because it's disabled, and constantly loops through that, producing high CPU usage.

I indeed do have Siri disabled and would rather not enable it, but I will check it once the issues reappears. Issue is, at least for me, it happens randomly, so it is hard to say when it will happen again. I noticed it also kicks in for some time after reboot (together with spotlight indexing), but it goes away quite fast.