Windowserver killing CPU% and performance Etrecheck help

Fishysydney wrote:

I ran several Etr reports, removed Sophos and Displaylink manager for the external monitor and not used a second screen for two days. Reinstalled Adobe, and deleted anything that looked odd.

Back to your Etrecheck report ...

2025-02-26 Microsoft Defender (101.24122.0011) it shows as not loaded but it has pieces and extensions that could be interfering even when "turned off."

2025-02-13 Hotspot Shield (6.12.0) not sure what this is but it looks like a VPN or security tool of some sort.

2025-02-27 16:30:40 apfsd High CPU Use (2 times) this could be a clue as apfsd is part of the MacOS that handles encryption, decryption, disk maintenance etc. for apfs drives. Something is making your Mac work hard for the external drives.

2025-02-27 11:37:32 Sophos Scan.app High CPU Use you indicated that you "removed" Sophos, how confident are you that all vestiges of Sophos are uninstalled? How did you remove it?

I would completely uninstall Microsoft Defender. This is sometimes not easy to do, but the best approach is to use an uninstaller from the developer. I would also re-check that all traces of Sophos are gone, preferably with the developer uninstaller.

I would completely uninstall Hotspot Shield.

2025-01-12 Samsung Portable SSD Software 1.0 (1.7.5.4)

2025-01-12 Samsung Portable SSD Software 1.0 Setup (1.7.5.4)

It would be better not to have third party disk utilities as they sometimes are incompatible with the MacOS. When this happens, they keep trying to interact with the drives and can churn up lots of cpu cycles. The indication that apfsd had problems is a little concerning given that third party disk tools are also running.

I would disconnect all external drives.

After all these things, I would retest for the problem. Not COMPLETELY uninstalling all traces of these tools might result in the problem still being there. These uninstalls and disconnect of external drives are diagnostics, temporary things to try to narrow down the cause(s). Everything can be restored later to as it was.

I saw a reddit post about this same issue. The suggestion was to kill the Grammarly Desktop app and remove it from Open at Login. My WindowServer CPU was upwards of 90%, now it's to 11.6%. I just launched PowerPoint and the WindowServer spiked up to 30% but has stayed under 12%.

Removing Grammerly Desktop and Grammerly for Safari fixed the problem for me

Fishysydney wrote:

Top Processes Snapshot by CPU:

Process (count) CPU (Source - Location)

WindowServer 63.84 % (Apple)

Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) (10) 53.94 % (Google LLC)

What happens if you run Safari instead of Chrome?

Wooow, you are hero, after uninstalled the Grammarly , my MacBook is back . Really appreciate you help and information!

From another will respected contributor @ John Galt

refer https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255978513?answerId=261201811022&sortBy=oldest_first#261201811022

Quote " The solution is staring you in the face. Uninstall Google Chrome, a notorious resource hog. No one needs Chrome.

Follow its uninstallation instructions. " End Quote

Removing Chrome does not eliminate it’s background “keystone” tasks. If they remain they are likely to keep causing problems.

See https://chromeisbad.com for an explanation of what they do and how to remove them.

I have been having similar trouble for almost three days now. I have noticed that every time I open PowerPoint, within about 15 minutes, the lagging becomes unbearable. I can see my sentences being typed letter by letter. At first, I thought it was just the icon, so I turned off the transparency feature and realised it's every input, including the typing. After 15 minutes of using it, my MacBook became so unbearably slow that I had to restart it. I also tried using 'sudo purge', thinking it might be a memory issue. I have now narrowed it down to PowerPoint. If I use Chrome to surf the web, everything is fine. Using Opera without Chrome is also acceptable. So I don't think simply blaming Google Chrome is a solution to this frustratingly slow issue caused by the new update.

Same here M1 Air. External monitors connected, displaylink dock used to have two external monitors.

After the 15.3.1 upgrade - The system was not usable, sluggish, slow performance.

WindowServer tak up to 100%cpu. Reboot helps for few minutes. All day using MS software, outlook, teams, edge.

At beggining I was sure this is Microsoft software problem but investigating in more deep I have found out.

1. Problem is less actual if working only on MAC screen.
2. After reboot, the problem returns in 5-10 min.
3. tried to delete/Library/Preferences/com.apple. window server.displays.plist and restarted. The problem was solved for ~ 12 hours. Normal Windowserver process CPU consumption 12-30%
4. DisplayLink driver also not in charge.

I see ppl is reporting same issue starting from OSX 15.3

looks like APPLE don;t care about this issue.

Excel is facing the same situation. Seems like any Office App open will cause lagging. Even after close it the lagging is still exists. Only way is Restart System. This should be even low level issue which cannot be resolve, I did tried with use Darwin-Nix rebuild my system (Which have home manager to manage desktop and most of my used software) but seems it's effortless. It's pretty noisy dealing with it.

Temp solution will be use LibreOffice instead Office365 until next release mac version (Or switch to beta version MacOS)

Seeing this on 15.3.2 on a MacBook Pro M1 Max 64 GB. Anecdotally, it seems to correlate with having a USB-A jump drive connected for a few minutes. It's formatted FAT32. Again, not sure if it's something else, but after disconnecting that drive all the frame dropping went away.

Bottom line, it seems like there was a recent change in WindowServer that needs looking into.

 am experiencing performance issues with my MacBook Pro (M3, 18GB RAM). The only way to temporarily resolve the issue is by restarting my device, but after a few hours, it slows down again.

I noticed that the CPU and GPU usage in Windows consistently exceed 100%. Additionally, sometimes when I try to take a screenshot (Print Screen), copy, or paste, it seems to trigger the problem as well.

I suspect the issue might be related to the Print Screen function or clipboard management.

Anyone know how to solve it ?

macOS: Sequoia 15.3.1

Macbook Pro : M3 Pro , 18GB

Quote from @ Grant Bennet-Alder

" WindowServer is the task that makes sure the right stuff is in every window, manages multiple windows in multiple positions on the screen, possibly overlapping or not, and generally manages all issues related to drawing the stuff on the screen. " End Quote 

I also have the same problem with my MacBook Pro (M3, 18GB RAM). I killed the process of WindowServer and rebooted the PC. Now, WindowServer is behaving with 12.2% CPU -- oh, now 20.9% in 3 minutes. But I am not expecting it will stay as I do some work. I hope the issue will be solved soon.