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.

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. "

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.

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

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

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

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.

Here is one more piece of information, after I searched Apple support for idelassetsd, I got this

Use Apple products on enterprise networks - Apple Support

it says:

Apps and additional content

Apple devices need access to the following hosts and domains for installing and updating apps, using certain app features, and downloading additional content. Some additional content might also be hosted on third-party content distribution networks.

Hosts: sylvan.apple.com

Ports: 80, 433

Protocol: TCP

OS: tvOS and macOS

Description: Aerial screen savers and wallpaper

Supports proxies: —

I also played with LittleSnitch firewall to see the effect on Activity Monitor CPU %, and real-time network traffic (reported for process by LittleSnitch) when I block and unblock network access for idleassetsd.

Blocked: about 1,000 "network access requests denied" per second, CPU % usage goes to about 150% and system heats up, and network download is reduced by about 500KBytes/sec.

Allowed: one "network access requests allowed", CPU % usage goes to about 2% and system cools off, and network download is runs continuously at a rate of additional 500KBytes/sec over whatever else is going on.

Network upload traffic is negligible compared to download traffic.

Again, this is on Sonoma 14.4.1 on an old Mac mini (2018) on a rural DSL line that only achieves (at best) 4MBits/sec download and 512Kbits upload speed (often worse - Thanks to Brightspeed/Centurylink for never replacing the buried copper-pair POTS lines since they were put in).

At some point, I might get to transport the MacMini to a place with Google Fiber and let it download to its heart's content. Maybe I only have another 50GB of animated screen savers and backgrounds remaining to be downloaded, and it will be finished with me and this episode will end. Apple, you have a demand-hog failure with idelassetsd (150% usage thread and 1,000 network requests per second makes my system glitchy - how about backing that off to 1 network check per five seconds for this NON-ESSENTIAL daemon task?).

Well, unless there is an ISP Data Cap on your Internet subscription.

The temp solution you have enabled may or may not have negative repercussions system wide

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

This did work for me, thank you