edouard58 wrote:
I think you are mistaken. I have NEVER started any of the above software that I mentioned but yet, they are working in the background. I kill them by using the monitor program and they end up starting back up by themselves.
No, I'm not mistaken.
There are many many processes that happen in the background on the Mac, as with any PC. Yes, you can kill some with the Activity Monitor, but those that are required for every day ops like storage management, file system ops, graphics processing and display, RAM processes, keyboard and hardware management, network communications, bluetooth communications, etc, etc... will of course be relaunched. At any given time there may be hundreds of processes running in the background in support of the normal operation of the Mac and any apps that are open or paused. This is all normal.
When I am streaming TV series, the CPU cycles will all of a sudden consume a massive amount of resources which is from sending packets to Apple servers. After about 3 minutes, the resources go back to normal. This happens on average every 30 minutes or so.
It is not unexpected that processes will start and stop when streaming network and internet communications via browser services and supporting applications. Video streams must be downloaded and buffered, device and network identifications must be established and maintained, information about video selection, progression, timecode progress and other info is shared. In short, there is a ton of stuff that must travel back and forth any time the Mac is connected to any network and running apps. I don't see anything going on here that is unexpected.
I don't use the iCloud backup services as I have my own backup system at home.
This is certainly your prerogative.
You have a MacBook Air, but you don't specify how it is configured - the amount of drive storage or RAM. I will assume that you might be experiencing some sort of performance degradation given the tone of your original post. If your computer is lacking the drive space that macOS needs for its best performance, then perhaps you need to consider freeing up space on the startup drive and maybe offloading some of your user data and libraries to an external drive. If the computer has only a minimal amount of RAM, there is nothing you can do about that but be judicious in your simultaneous use of apps, including browsers. Some apps, Chrome browser for example, are known resource hogs. Adjust your user habits accordingly.
