Q: "bird" process is taking over

Yep!  I snagged it from another support thread, I don't deserve much credit.

I actually just subscribed to increase space in iCloud drive to put my big (100 GB+) iPhoto collection in there and keep it safe.  Since copying it in, it's been chugging along for a while now (all day).  In this time, I've seen the bird process running pretty high most of the time, dipping down to ~30% sometimes.

When I quit the process, I see the transactions stop, I see it re-establish itself, and pick back up (see screenshot).

Just below the screenshot, you'd see "typical transactions" start again.

And soon thereafter, I can see the bird process jump back up in CPU usage.  I'm tempted to say that the process just ramps up and works hard when it has a lot to do, rather than it being a true problem.  Albeit, it does slow other things down.

On the plus side, at least one guy tested and concluded it works quickly compared to competitors.  And to note, other syncing services can have high CPU usage while they're syncing too.

http://macography.net/2014/10/speed-test-icloud-drive-vs-dropbox-vs-google-drive -vs-box-com-vs-spideroak-vs-syncplicity/

My conclusion: if you put a big file in and you see the bird process ramp up, just keep calm and let it do its thing.

MBA mid 2011, 10.10.2, 256GB SSD, 200GB iCloud Drive

Wanted to share my experience:

I've got 90GB of files in iCloud, and on Mac boot-up, 'bird' would always run at 90-100% CPU for several hours.

I'd put my iTunes Library in iCloud Drive, so I tried quitting iTunes, which launched at boot, and after a minute or two bird died down.

Launching iTunes after booting doesn't seem to cause bird to thrash the CPU.

brctl log --wait --shorten  in Terminal seems to confirm this. Perhaps the iTunes .xml or .itl files constantly trying to update are causing a problem?

Folks, this "bird" process is totally jacked up.  I have my MacBookPro partitioned for Yosemite and Win8.1 on Parallels.

1. Turning off icloud for Yosemite solved my problem with bird running at 100% cpu all the time (VM is not running). 

2. The same problem in 8.1 VM runs bird at 100% as well - I have icloud installed since I'm syncing with Outlook.  Even after shutting down VM and only running Yosemite, bird is running at 98%. I had to restart system to resolve.

This "bird" process is seriously flawed and needs to be fixed. I've called Apple for support on this issue, so hopefully someone will get on it and fixes this.

I have the same thing going on here, I want to use iCloud drive to backup important files, burt every time I click on iCloud Drive folder the BIRD starts taking over my Macbook. I hope the people at apple are going to fix this. Especially with the new Photo app, with which I'd like to store all my photos on iCloud Drive.

Hello, had the same issue, with Mac slowing down gradually - 'bird' taking upto 95% of the processor, slowing down and making apps like Mail and firefox and others stall and crash repeatedly.  Very frustrating experience !

Tnx to some answers above, I decided to take the syncing folder out of the iCloud drive and stopped the service in preferences.

When you uncheck the iCloud Drive in preferences, it says 'to delete all files on your Mac' which is pretty awkward (!!) - when you stop a service, one'd rather choose to delete everything from the iCloud, no ?

Anyway, I got full speed of my Mac back !!

This experience should be warning enough not to use iCloud Drive at all in the way you use Dropbox.

iCloud drive is unworkable, except if you use it for a few dozen small files.

I have got 10,000 files, together 2 GB, on it and iCloud behaves badly.

1. I am not sure they are all there (sync is slow and inconsistent)

2. what is there, I cannot see in iOS

3. what is there is nearly impossible to delete and it keeps coming back

Guys, this is not Dropbox at all!

Try using CrashPlan. Code42 makes it. It's pretty awesome on my wife's not so powerful macbook. She never notices it's there since I set it up. I recommend looking up how to backup your entire drive as a full backup. It's like a true Time Machine online. Alternately though it can be used to sync docs better than any of the current big dogs out there IMO. (I am not affiliated with them I just like that I finally found a decent solution)

Using iCloud Drive is still constantly draining my battery.

The bird process is using between 50% and 100% CPU usage, all time. I have only some files in there from pages, numbers and so on.

This is ridiculous because while using the cpu with nearly 100% there are no file changes or i don't even have any of these applications running.

If i don't user iCloud-Drive, i have about 8h batterylife (as expected) but then i can't use any cloud services. For example 1password sync through iCloud is not possible.

Apple should really fix that iCloud battery drain. Right now iCloud Drive is not usable for users who need a "all day battery-life" and that is a shame.

I found a solution.

There seems to be a problem with hidden files stored in iCloud Drive. I tried to delete all my folders through the iCloud.com webportal but if you do so not all files are deleted even if you don't see any files on icloud.com. On iOS in the iCloud settings i still had several folders that where shown. These folders where only shown on iOS devices. They were empty but used several MB. After deleting these files within the iOS setting the bird process calms down on my OS X devices.

i  think its rediculous

i unplugged my external hard drives (they store the original files i had backed up to iCloud) then i went into iCloud settings and unchecked iCloud drive.. problem solved.  iCloud ***** at syncing a terabyte of data. the story is i uploaded all my hi resolution raw files to iCloud drive as an extra precaution in case a physical drive died on me.. it would seem its less of a pain in the butt to just buy another terabyte or two or three and clone the drives. i warn you now syncing upwards of just 100 gigs of data will bog your system down to the point of wanting to throw things out the window.

Hi, my brctl output looks different from the example above. The name of the uploaded file is not shown somehow. I just get a number of files like

[note]  1422.208 [2015-11-13 21:46:18.967] brc.sync                       sync.up             BRCSyncUpOperation.m:429

  sending 1 items to the cloud for com.apple.CloudDocs

[note]  1425.493 [2015-11-13 21:46:22.252] sqlite.serverTruth             zone.server               BRCServerZone.m:748

  received 2 edited items and 0 deleted items from the cloud for com.apple.CloudDocs

Does anybody know how to increase the log details or how to show the names?

Thx

My "bird" process was mad because, 100 times per second (repeated), it was fixed on this underlying error, found with the Terminal-script:

brctl log --wait --shorten:

[ERROR]   1.023 [2016-02-27 22:42:17.047] bird.scheduler.Uploader        fs.uploader               BRCFSUploader.m:

Unable to copy thumbnail at '/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/18f/com.apple.thumbnails/:501:QLThumbnailA dditionName/thumbnail.jpg' to upload internship: Error Domain = NSCocoaErrorDomain Code = 260 "Unable to open" thumbnail.jpg "file because it does not exist." UserInfo = 0x7fabcb102a50 {NSFilePath=/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/18f/com.apple.thumbnails/:501:Q LThumbnailAdditionName/thumbnail.jpg, NSUnderlyingError 0x7fabcb18a550 = "Unable to complete the operation. File or directory does not exist"}

As in the report, the problem was located here down:

'/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/18f/com.apple.thumbnails/:501:QLThumbnailAd ditionName/thumbnail.jpg’

and so, I'm placed in that specific location, changing, one by one, all the permissions as admin - read /written- and I gave him the file **** with a photo to the event named "thumbnail.jpg"

In this way I solved. maybe is creazy but, now the cpu is back to normal and the fan runs at low values.