High Band With "idleassetsd" & "nsurlsessiond" back ground process

I ran into this issue as well as idleassetsd in my activity monitor was using 50GB/hr that led to over 700GB usage per day.

I contacted Apple Support and they recommended setting Wallpapers and Screensavers to a static image.

After restarting Activity Monitor idleassetsd stopped downloading as it is now at 0 bytes sent and recieved.

I was able to get it to stop by setting the Sonoma screen saver. This is right below the wallpapers section. Im also using a static wallpaper. Before this I was using a little snitch to block idleassetd but that'll slowly then eat up memory. I seen it go high as 30gb.

Overall Apple L. Stop doing this BS. I wasted more than 40 gigs from metered connection.

Having the same issue although the idleassetsd process downloaded 3.83 TB of data in less that 24 hours these severely spiking my data costs. Would love to find a solution that will work and not lead to other downstream issues. For now I have turn off dynamic wallpapers hoping that will help.

I had this exact same issue. Disabling animated wallpapers solves it immediately. So unless you desperately want animated wallpaper/screensaver, the easy fix is just disabling them. Clearly a bug in the system though, no way it should require such a massive amount of downloads.

idleassetsd connecting to sylvan.apple.com might be what has been causing my rural 4Mbit DSL download speed to land in the crater recently. I've been trying to uncover what has caused my household bandwidth to sink to 1 and 2Mbit download speeds.

I have Little Snitch (ObjectiveDevelopment) firewall (highly recommend - not in Apple Store) and took a look at what's using my bandwidth.

I blocked downloads from sylvan.apple.com specifically. Screen grab attached: for some time (how long ?) idleassetsd has pulled down 126GBytes from sylvan.apple.com. For comparison, the process nsurlsessiond has only done 5GB).

I don't know what idleassetsd is doing but since blocking it my DSL speeds are back to their crumby usual self.

However, the blocked requests look like about 1,000 requests PER SECOND, and it is at the top of my %CPU usage in Monitor. Killing process, it comes back in a second. Problem not solved yet but this may have been what is draining my DSL bandwidth; I have spent hours with Brightspeed (Centurylink) tech support trying to solve / complain the poor connectivity. This seems to be recent, or it comes in fits and spurts.

Instead of adding a firewall app like LuLu, you can stop idleassetsd communicating with sylvan.apple.com by adding the following entry to the /etc/hosts file (as root or with sudo)

# workaround for idleassets bandwidth consumption
127.0.0.1             sylvan.apple.com

Yes. I’m having this experience too. Lots of data consuming. Please Apple help…

idleassetsd is used by the TVIdleServices framework for asset downloading and privileged operations. It is used by various clients in macOS. It is not meant to be invoked directly.

This indicates it's coming from tvOS and indeed used for downloading animated wallpapers.

Credits to ➡️ Esquared ⬅️ for below and I Copy and Paste the reply

" nsurlsessiond is the process that is used by iCloud to sync your iCloud Drive/Photos/Contacts/etc between your machine(s) and the iCloud server. A lot of people seem to have issues with it: a simple search for nsurlsessiond on this site will give numerous results, but no quick fixes I'm afraid. Anything that uses iCloud Drive - including third party applications - might be implicated. "

I tried below steps and stopping the process within 1 minute by killing through crontab setting -

open terminal then

sudo crontab -e

add Below lines in your text editor :

*/1 * * * * pkill -f idleassetsd

*/1 * * * * pkill -f nsurlsessiond

Yes, I agree. Apple, come on. This is nuts. Is there no way to stop the downloads?

Continuing my earlier post (I can't seem to edit now) Oh yes, and FWIW, I also have set Network -> WiFi -> (network name) Details -> Low Data Mode = "On", and restarted WiFi again on the network. Does not seem to make a difference to idleassetsd, it kept plugging away hogging bandwidth. Maybe *that* is the bug report here - consumes all BW even on slow network access. And stop hogging CPU at 1,000 requests PER SECOND.

This is on a 2018 Mac mini, 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5, running Sonoma 14.4.1

I have this issue too. It’s downloading more than 100GB and won’t stop. I selected a static wallpaper and screensaver, but it continues downloading. I blocked internet access for idleassetsd using the LuLu app. After that, idleassetsd seems to hang, using 60% of my M1 CPU and filling up all my RAM. Right now, I’ve written a shell script to repeatedly kill the process so I can use my device. This is a bad situation and needs to be fixed.

I had this issue on Sonoma. I used some basic methods to see the unencrypted content, and it was due to screen savers/wallpapers. The thing is, I clicked on them and ultimately did not use them, so it would seem that it triggered a background download of a ton of large high-def video files, regardless of the fact that they are no longer selected (and they continue to download). It doesn't bother me, as it seems to throttle itself down when other traffic starts to show up, so I haven't noticed any slowdown. I can see the video files consuming hard disk space (I took a snapshot, let it sit, took another, and compared the difference (please don't tell me that there are a million better ways of doing that. I was doing it for another issue primarily).

You can run lsof if you are comfortable with the terminal. Here is what mine showed:

user@computer ~ % lsof | grep -i idle
Wallpaper   581 user    4r      REG                1,4  481292429             5366651 /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/4KSDR240FPS/097CA871-A1C2-40F7-97F0-EFAABF555BBC.mov

If you prefer using a GUI, there is a great free program that basically visualizes the lsof output. The utility is Sloth.

Note that it takes "snapshots" and is not a monitor (although you can have it refresh at certain intervals).

Output From Sloth:

Note that in both cases, the output can be very large, which is why I used "grep -i idle" and searched in Sloth (I highlighted the search box in the top right).

I would not recommend blocking this connection in any way. The OS uses this to download many things. I would figure out exactly what it is downloading and work from there. Otherwise, you may have issues in the future when the OS is trying to download something that you do want, but it is blocked. Additionally, it will continue to try to connect and download and continue to fail, which would be undesirable.

Edit:

I found a SQLite database of what it is downloading. However, I wouldn't mess with that without talking to Apple Support first.

Setting static wallpaper and screensaver and then rebooting did not make any difference

Wiping /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd (eg sudo killall idleassetsd; sudo rm -r "/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd") seems to have worked so far