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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

+1 Thank you :-)

I have 2013 Mac Pro. I check and I had Siri enabled and triald was using 0 CPU. I turned Siri off and it stayed at 0.

Running M1 MBA Monterey 12.3 and M1 Mac Mini also Monterey 12.3 with Siri enabled on both.

refer below Activity Monitor Screen Shot

Thanks for your response, but I know what I'm doing, and have run through all general troubleshooting steps already.

More eyes on the issue the more chances to find the solution

I already have a solution, I'm just looking for confirmation from others that are affected that this solution is valid, prior to submitting a bug report.