Horrible Battery life after MacOS 13.2 upgrade

agphillips7 wrote:

This appeared fixed, however after my upgrade to MacOS 13.2, the unkillable process Syspolicyd is back to reading around 7-15 TB a day of the same folder over and over and rendering my laptop absolutely and utterly useless with around a 2 hour battery life and constant screaming fans. Apple, fix this bug, this has existed since freaking Catalina. If anyone knows how to just delete this process entirely or hide this folder from it, please let me know. (if this cannot be fixed I want my 5 grand back but I know that won't happen so I resort to begging in a community post because Genius Bar and apple care are wholly unhelpful in this situation.)

I wish I had a straight forward answer—

I would try clearing system cache files and compare your results via Safeboot

How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support will sort many anomalies

From the Terminal you can see what files are touched by the root process:

sudo lsof -c syspolicyd

you can read more—

What exactly is syspolicyd and why is it … - Apple Community

To trouble shoot further you can:

—Test issue in another user (or guest user) account Change Users & Groups settings on Mac - Apple Support

This will tell you if it a universal issue or isolated to your user/admin account. 

If no insight or resolve I would be inclined to reinstall the full macOS on top of your existing macOS 13.2

You can do this from Terminal as well as Recovery...

How to reinstall macOS

Recovery (both M1 and Intel) — How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support

full installer ~12.26 GB from Terminal , when complete you launch it from Applications folder; copy and paste:

sudo softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 13.2

Two help with the diagnostics of your system download and run Etrecheck.  Copy and paste the results into your reply. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

Copy the report

and use the Additional Text button to paste the report in your reply.

Then we can evaluate the report to see if we can get any insight into the cause of the problem.

I don't see any of the usual suspects but there are several items that are of concern:

1 - "Time since boot: About 29 days". You should reboot more frequently at least 2-3 times per week. I'm off the school that when I shut down for the night I shut down totally. The will clear out temporary system and application swap and cache files which can help performance. Shutting down at night could help the battery drain issue.

2 - You seem to have 3 VPN asap installed: Sophos, Fortine and OpenVPN. The following is for your considerations: unless you're using a true VPN tunnel, such as between you and your employer's, school's or bank's servers, they provide false security from a privacy standpoint.  Read these two articles: Public VPN's are anything but private and Former Malware Distributor Kape Technologies Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN “Review” Websites.

It they are not required by any of those organizations I'd uninstall them according to the developer's instructions.

3 - the User Login Items: I'd reduce them to just those you absolutely must have open all the time. The others can be launched when needed and closed afterward. An example is SpeedTest.

Honestly, if you are going to go through the trouble of reinstalling the OS, you might as well downgrade to a system that didn't have the issue. Ventura is a horrible system, I wouldn't wait on apple by supplying system reports. Using feedback assistant is the only way they will see it so, I personally suggest sending them your screenshots and description using their assistant, then downgrade to a system that isn't causing problems. I'm just going to go ahead and say anything after Mojave kinda just causes problems in one way or another. Not sure why apple is dropping the ball but the systems just keep getting worse.

There have been others reporting battery issues with Ventura. Unfortunately, not having a laptop, I didn't pay close attention to the previous reports and don't remember if there was a "one fix fits all" solution.

My recommendations may not fix the battery issue but are worth considering for overall general performance.

hi have same problem.

here is my report.

can you help me?

Thank you. I will try your suggestions.

But I want to say that, I am using MacBook from 2012.

This is the first time i have encountered something like this. I think Apple hear us.