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User profile for user: bradleyfrommaine
bradleyfrommaine Author
User level: Level 1
17 points

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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User profile for user: bradleyfrommaine
bradleyfrommaine Author
User level: 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:


  1. 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.
  2. Reboot into Safe Mode. Run Activity Monitor and kill any process that matches "trial".
  3. Immediately open Finder to ~/Library/ and move the trial folder to the trash. Empty the trash.
  4. 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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User profile for user: precaffeinated
precaffeinated
User level: Level 1
4 points

Mar 28, 2022 9:11 AM in response to natenate

I tried a variety of launchctl commands to stop /usr/libexec/triald and disable it, I killed the process, deleted the plist, but it kept coming back. I tried deleting ~/Library/Trial and then your suggestion of turning Siri back on, but my ~/Library/Trial came back with an additional 128,000 files totaling a half a gig.

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User profile for user: precaffeinated
precaffeinated
User level: Level 1
4 points

Mar 28, 2022 9:14 AM in response to michal_s

I tried a variety of launchctl commands to stop /usr/libexec/triald and disable it, I killed the process, deleted the plist, but it kept coming back. I tried deleting ~/Library/Trial and then the suggestion of turning Siri back on, but my ~/Library/Trial came back with an additional 128,000 files totaling a half a gig.

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User profile for user: bradleyfrommaine
bradleyfrommaine Author
User level: Level 1
17 points

Mar 29, 2022 4:40 AM in response to natenate

Same experience here.


Enabling/disabling Siri had no effect — over time. By the way, after one shot of deleting the ~/Library/Trial folder and rebooting into Safe Mode, the process trial immediately really went to town, no delay, attempting to rebuild the entire Trial database complex.


If ~/Library/Trial is deleted, within a day or two triald and a trial archiving process get busy until the full database complex in the Trial folder is rebuilt. It seems that it is during this rebuild phase that they run up the CPU cycles. My folder tops out at about this: "61,219,498 bytes (667.2 MB on disk) for 173,661 items".


Two-thirds of a Gig of data. A so far undocumented process. Overcomes disabling with launchctl. I didn't see this expanse of data until the Golden Master of Monterey Beta 12.3 on my machine. Is it a process that is out of hand, or possibly Apple's confusion as to who's machine this is?

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User profile for user: bradleyfrommaine
bradleyfrommaine Author
User level: Level 1
17 points

Mar 29, 2022 5:05 AM in response to PRP_53

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?

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User profile for user: natenate
natenate
User level: Level 1
9 points

Mar 31, 2022 8:31 PM in response to precaffeinated

Setting 000 permissions on ~/Library/Trial will indeed work, but I'm not sure it's advisable, and it also causes logd to elevate its CPU usage due to triald constantly failing to write to its data directory.


I have had good luck with enabling Siri and then deleting Siri history via System Preferences. It does not cut down on the disk space usage in ~/Library/Trial but it does seem to mitigate triald from pegging the CPU.


There was also a recent overview of triald here that is quite good:


https://eclecticlight.co/2022/03/31/what-is-triald-and-why-is-it-taking-so-much-disk-space/


But it really doesn't add much additional information to what we already know.

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User profile for user: brucefromSBR
brucefromSBR
User level: Level 1
8 points

Apr 28, 2022 3:02 PM in response to bradleyfrommaine

My 4 month old MB pro had been literally stalling occasionally, sometimes for several minutes. I now know what to check. Trial on mine is 1.9Gb and cpu usage has been as high as 96%. I didn't pay almost $4k for this kind of performance. The fact that apple won't explain it is just as frustrating.

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

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