Ever since updating my 2019 MacBook Pro to Sonoma, my fans randomly flare up to the point of potential lift off. Each time, Activity Monitor shows "CSExattrCryptoService" using 99.9% of the CPU.
14.2.1 has made this issue far worse.
Can anything be done?
Thank you in advance, and happy holidays.
MacBook Pro, 16-inch, 2019, 8 TB SSD, 64 GB RAM, Intel
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 14.2
The process sounds like a scam. I would suggest Apple change the name to exclude "crypto" so people are less suspicious of it.
The process sounds like a scam. I would suggest Apple change the name to exclude "crypto" so people are less suspicious of it.
that appears to be part of spotlight indexing.
The reason it is much worse after upgrading is that you changed about 350,000 files when you updated. All the non-system files need to be indexed.
In addition, if your backup drive is nearly full, there will not be enough room on it to hold all the updates. So Time machine needs to consolidate (NOT DELETE) the files from your very oldest backup session(s) and remove those very old sessions. Since those files are referenced in more recent backups, the process of consolidation is lengthy, and involves a lot of I/O.
It needs time to run when your Mac is awake and not busy. if you give it that time, it will finish and stop being intrusive.
Why would the process have "Crypto" in the name if it is a spotlight indexing process; how is it related to crypto?
This has been happening to my MBP (2019, 16 GB RAM) since upgrading to Sonoma and installing updates. There's been plenty of time for Spotlight to complete indexing, but it keeps happening. (I use iCloud for my docs, so there's nearly 800 GB space on my 1 TB hard drive at the moment).
Because your drive could be encrypted, and/or your backup could be encrypted.
...and even if yours are not, that could be the name of the process that (optionally) deals with encryption (if present).
CSExattrCryptoService - What is this?
