ovrdrvn wrote:
I run an MSP, and while I have third-party software, I've disabled it and seen no results. I also turned off iCloud, force quit bird, and turned it back on. While I tried to read the logs from bird in the terminal...far too much gibberish to decipher.
A Medical Services Plan?
Force quitting a system daemon is always a bad idea. It will be restarted automatically. When it restarts, it will detect that it exited in an error state and will likely require additional CPU usage when it restarts.
Please, never, ever try to read logs on a Mac. At best, you will be completely unable to decipher the heavily redacted logs that scroll past 400 lines a second. I've seen more than one person completely lose touch with reality and develop some serious paranoid delusions. I realize people are suing Apple over AirTags, but I think Console on the Mac (and Analytics on the iPhone) causes more real-world mental distress for people than AirTags.
If you really, really want to dig into the internals of iCloud and bird, you will need to use the Terminal and become very familiar with the "brctl" tool.
I will note that bird has gone down tremendously
I sincerely doubt it. Turning iCloud off or on is a major operation. It is probably more significant than erasing the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system. Never do it unless you have exhausted all options. It may take a few hours for iCloud just to spin up again. Then, it may take a few days, running bird at 10x the CPU usage you had before, to download all of your data from iCloud again.
PS: The suggestion to use brctl is strictly for future reference. Since you've turned off iCloud and turned it back on, all of your data will be trash for the next week or so until everything settles down. After that time, you could then use brctl effectively. But for now, it will just be gibberish, 100,000 lines of gibberish.