Apple Intelligence is now available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac!

You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

"useractivityd" constantly uses more and more CPU

All of a sudden the fan of my iMac got crazy. Then when looking in Activity Monitor I noticed that a Process called "useractivityd" uses up to 340% of my CPU. It goes up an down between 200 and 340. I have no clue what is going on and google couldn't help me.

Anyone know what's going on?

(iMac Mac (27-inch, Late 2013), 3.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3)


Thank you

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Jun 2, 2022 1:13 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 2, 2022 4:51 AM

The user ( you ) have hit on a possible series of Run Away Processing happening on this computer resulting in this native process to spike.


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 - Sometimes a Safe Boot followed by a Normal Boot will just put things right.


4 - 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.


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


6 - If after performing each of the above steps is the order that have been presents and still have issues - please advise for possible further assistance.


3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 2, 2022 4:51 AM in response to Prof.Farnsworth

The user ( you ) have hit on a possible series of Run Away Processing happening on this computer resulting in this native process to spike.


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 - Sometimes a Safe Boot followed by a Normal Boot will just put things right.


4 - 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.


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


6 - If after performing each of the above steps is the order that have been presents and still have issues - please advise for possible further assistance.


"useractivityd" constantly uses more and more CPU

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.