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

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.

Posted on Mar 21, 2022 4:25 AM

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bradleyfrommaine Author

Level 1

17 points

Posted on Apr 29, 2022 5:02 AM

What worked for me on a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro, and has lasted now for several weeks:

Turn off Siri in System Preferences. If if is already off, turn it on. Give it some time—I don't know how much—then turn it off. This may be an unnecessary step, but turning on Siri then later turning it off was part of my process.
Reboot into Safe Mode. Run Activity Monitor and kill any process that matches "trial".
Immediately open Finder to ~/Library/ and move the trial folder to the trash. Empty the trash.
Reboot normally, and the trial folder in ~/Library/ will be initialized.

Since I performed these steps, the ~/Library/trial folder has been using less than 5MB of disk space with ± 200 items. My guess is that there may have been an unannounced fix from Apple's end, but the trial folder has to be reinitialized for the fix to take root.

Brad

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

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