in teh last 24 hours my Mac's performance has ground to a halt. Simple apps (word etc) take 30 seconds to open. Spellcheck creates a spinning pizza. Looking at the Activity Monitor, rtcreportingd and fileproviderd are both using a great deal of CPU/resouce - can I delete them?!
iMac (2017 – 2020)
Try restarting in Safe mode
Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
This can clear some caches and solve weird issues.
The results of some Google searches suggest that fileproviderd is a daemon (background process) that helps with cloud storage services that use Apple APIs. These include iCloud Drive and also apparently Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. I suspect that if you "delete" fileproviderd, either (a) something will restart it, or (b) you will break a cloud service that you are currently using.
I saw one site on the Web that started off well enough – explaining that fileproviderd is part of the operating system and what Apple designed it to do. The site then falsely referred to fileproviderd as a "Fileproviderd high CPU virus" and a "malicious application", gave manual steps to "delete"/"remove" it – and finally ended up pushing a supposed "cleaner" program to "detect and remove fileproviderd virus."
In my opinion, referring to fileproviderd as a "malicious application" and a "virus" is false. It's quite possible that it has bugs, or that it is poorly designed with respect to how much of the CPU it consumes when you give your Mac a large cloud-storage-related job. It might even be the case that you would sometimes want to kill a running system process and start a new copy of it.
But any software engineer worth their salt should know enough not to call a background process that they know is part of the operating system a "virus". It wouldn't make me want to download and run their "cleaner" application.
rtcreportingd is crippling me - can I delete it?!
