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.


Posted on Jul 4, 2023 2:26 PM

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Jul 4, 2023 4:34 PM in response to MrHoffman

Thanks. This system has 32GB mom / 1TB SS drive running BigSur 11.7.8

I have 260G of photos from any number of sources (including iPhone).


System ran great when I first bought it.


Disappointed that Apple support couldn't find this. And that there is no way to configure the daemon let alone stop it. And how did it take me years to figure this out?


It seems that killing photoanalysisd solved the issue. knock on wood.



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Jul 5, 2023 8:54 AM in response to dwavo

dwavo wrote:

Do you work for Etrecheck?


While the developer of that app does post around here (and not about EtreCheck), nobody else posting here does.


EtreCheck avoids having to ask myriad configuration questions, and also avoids having to explain how to obtain each bit of configuration data, and for each poster.


So yes, the app gets suggested here. Often.


I’d like Apple to integrate something similar—no offense intended toward EtreCheck here—but Apple does not, and the closest analogs including system snapshots and spindump mechanisms are not useful for this purpose.


Jul 5, 2023 9:33 AM in response to dwavo

i tried the apple support route. i have posted before. apple should have such a tool. i finally chased this down using CL top -a


it might be that the photos were not of apple origin and photosnalysisD was confused. these archive files are over 5 years old and not altered.


still working - seems to have solved tbe problem

27" iMac running painfully slow (2014) photoanalysisd spinning globe of death

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