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ubittibu Author

Level 1

15 points

Dock using 100% CPU and lot of VM after El Capitan update

MBP early 2011, upgraded to 10.11 El Capitan from Yosemite.

Since the update Dock is using 100% CPU and great amount of Virtual Memory, can reach 40gb in 1 hour and growing.

These steps tried so far:

1) deleted ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Dock.plist

2) deleted ALL the files in ~/Library/Preferences

3) removed ALL the files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents

5) deleted files in /library/Application Support/Dock

6) removed parallels, vmware, virtualbox

7) reinstalled 10.11

8) created new user with admin privileges: no problem for this user

9) disabled time machine

10) disabled spotlight

Restarted many times between these steps.

Force quitting the Dock stops the CPU and Memory usage for a minute, then it go increasing again.

Using the command

sudo opensnoop -n Dock

I get a list of files processed by dock, always the same files (mostly apps in the /applications folder) and it stops at /System/Library/Fonts/SFNSDisplay-Medium.otf

Don't know what to do next.. I would really like to keep my user account..

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11), MBP 2011

Posted on Oct 2, 2015 7:28 AM

Best reply

Eric Root

Level 10

684,105 points

Posted on Oct 2, 2015 1:27 PM

Try doing a Dock restart using the following Terminal command:

killall Dock

Log out/in and test. If that doesn’t work, you need to look in your user Library/Applications Support/Dock for the .db. Use the Finder “Go To Folder” command. Enter ~/Library/Applications Support/Dock. Move the .db to your desktop.

Then try a dock reset.

Applications/Utilities/Terminal enter the command

killall Dock

Log out/in test. If it works okay, delete the .db from the desktop.

If the Dock is the same, return the .db to where you got them from, overwriting the newer ones.

View in context

17 replies

Oct 29, 2015 5:52 PM in response to ubittibu

Thanks, I had this issue too and deleting the db files did the trick!

hh75

Level 1

9 points

Oct 29, 2015 8:07 PM in response to ubittibu

This worked for me too BUT ONLY when I followed the procedure with http://jschaible.com/reset-the-el-capitan-osx-dock/

Step 1: Open terminal and copy and paste this command and hit return:

defaults delete com.apple.dock

Step 2: Copy and paste this command and hit return:

killall Dock

Your dock will restart and you will see the factory default icon/app dock.

Dock using 100% CPU and lot of VM after El Capitan update