27" iMac running painfully slow (2014) photoanalysisd spinning globe of death
spinning globe of death. for years now, this system ran so slowly when I logged in I had to leave it for 10 minutes before I use a browser, open terminal, or read mail. And then it would bog down again. Month after month. I've looked at this time and again, ran some utilities, had my hard disks replaced, reloaded the OS. Apple support had no suggestions.
Well it looks like the culprit was photoanalysisd. I happen to store about 1T of photos here - that I don't want on iCloud. I found no way to configure what apple does with my photos. Maybe another way to address this would be to zip up that folder but sometimes I want to look through the directory. It's not on my desktop, I put them in in ~/ARCHIVE
I used top -a (again) and noticed that photoanalysisd was using 100% cpu again. Silly thing is that the photos are static, have not added to them in five years. On this forum I found that someone else had a similar issue.
I wrote a one line shell script (killphoto), /usr/bin/killall photoanalysisd that I can call anytime. This seems to have solved the problem. It might be that I can put this into the startup routine, or run it with a 10 minute sleep all the time. Apple is running 600 processes right now, what difference would one more make?
These are great computers, and yet I was on the verge of buying a new one. Killing photoanalysisd seems to make the system usable.