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gtyoung10 Author

Level 1

2 points

What is process cfprefsd in Activity Monitor?

What is process cfprefsd in Activity Monitor? It is being run by user _spotlight, root, and my admin login?

MacBook, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on Apr 9, 2013 7:22 PM

Best reply

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Posted on Apr 9, 2013 7:27 PM

cfprefsd provides preferences services for the CFPreferences and NSUserDefaults APIs.

There are no configuration options to cfprefsd manually.

From OS X man pages.

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18 replies

May 1, 2015 9:52 AM in response to gtyoung10

I am a bit puzzled by this process as well. OK if it is needed for some processes that I needn't worry about but why does it run just after booting the computer under another user name? I am looking at the activity monitor because my Mac has slowed down markedly in recent weeks. I seem to notice that there is permanent disk access even if the computer sits idle with no application running.

LenTS

Level 1

0 points

May 1, 2015 2:49 PM in response to Martin Oxford

I have had this behavior and it was my system hard drive "soft failing". I backed it up (took forever to do), and a few days later it failed completely. The backup was a bootable copy that worked great and at full speed.

ABTOP

Level 1

9 points

Mar 28, 2017 1:07 AM in response to gtyoung10

one is for NSA, the second is for CIA, and the last one is for FBI.

What is process cfprefsd in Activity Monitor?