"Keychain Circle Notification" not responding.

Hi Dove - and any others reading this:

Distnoted is definitely the one hogging all the CPU and killing it fixes the problem immediately. There are usually several instances of it in Activity Monitor, so force quit the one that says it has been running for hours (if you have one). From some of the reading I have done around the place this is not necessarily a problem with distnoted, it appears some other apps can cause it to go manic. Finding which ones is the problem.

At the time mine started to grind to a halt - I recognise the symptoms now and get into console and AM straight away - my CalNCService was going nuts and recording a time out error every 5 seconds.

I googled this service and found this tip:

http://www.dgkapps.com/blog/osx-tips/osx-tips-turn-off-disable-calendaragent-fro m-the-command-line/

And also this thread on Apple Support:

Recentsd and Calncservice processes Yosemite

I will be trying the first option as I use Outlook and don't need my notifications duplicated. Will report back if it fails.

There is a mention of killing any or all of your notifications in system preferences.

There was something else but my mind has suddenly gone blank - like my console does then this happens!

By the way, killing the distnoted service also fixed the keychaincircle and escrowsecurityalert that were not responding. I am not sure if they are linked as there is nothing when I google that.

EDIT - remembered what I forgot! I have an MBP running exact same OS and apps and have none of this issue on that....

Same problem, manually killing disnoted has solved it for now.

Activity Monitor showed Keychain was hung and long periods of spinning beachball, disnoted was using disproportionate cpu, Force Quit disnoted from within Activity Monitor appears to have immediately resolved all the other hung / non-responsive processes like Keychain.

10.11.6 on a mid-2011 MacBook Air. Thanks to replies who suggested this!

After years of reliable upgrades I've had many problems with both Yosemite and El Capitan with the system becoming non-responsive to the point where I couldn't even start Activity Monitor (don't normally have this running), when it's slow / non-responsive the regular Apple Force Quit never works, it's aways a system-called process not an application I've launched.

Also had numerous odd system hangs on Shut Down (system wouldn't shut down all the way, spinning gear on dark screen, manual power down needed). All intermittent.

Unfortunate as until Yosemite one of the nice things about OS X was its super high stability in comparison to Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10... every windows there is has troublesome). Ironically, though, in Windows CTRL-ALT-DEL almost always lets me kill a non-responsive Windows process and shut down normally, I rarely have to do a forced power down on Windows! On OS X, since Yosemite and continuing with El Capitan, often have to do this.

I wish Apple would stop the annual major updates of OS X (and soon to be Mac OS) and go back to a two year cycle, focusing more on stability. And introduce a more reliable "interrupt" that like CTRL-ALT-DEL for Task Manager on Windows, *always* bringing up Activity Monitor to force quit any process and pulls Activity Monitor to the front. Even when I can get Activity Monitor up, if my system is sluggish due to a hung process or app, Activity Monitor is slow to respond, and if the spinning beach ball is up, Activity Monitor never responds.

Mail App, Skype or iTunes are also sometimes unusable on my iMac. In the Activity Monitor they appear as "Not responding", like "Keychain Circle Notification", and "EscrowSecurityAlert". Force quitting does not work, I also have to force a full hard restart.

But this morning, I found something interesting that helped me in the Activity Monitor : I shot a process called "disnoted", that was consuming 350% of my processor !

As soon I shot it, everything defreezed instantly.

I don't know exactly what it is, but it worked perfectly.

I hope it will help you.

I have the same problem on MBAir OS X 10.11.5 and it generally starts with MS Outlook 365 and rolls off from there. I was up to 3 or 4 times-a-day "hard reset".

Resting the NVRAM seems to help, though. It is very easy (<Cmd>+<Option>+P+R reboot) and i have had to do this in the past on other MBAir's and it helped.

It is worth trying as many post and people are having problems.

BTW -- WAKE UP APPLE ... Steve Jobs is no longer running your QA department .... AND IT SHOWS!!!!!!

Just remembered one more thing.

The process distnoted that causes the issue sometimes, has several instances in Activity Monitor.

These would have the following users:

Spotlight

User

Distnote

IF you have one called mbsetupuser, you need to reboot your computer.

This is something to do with updating your OS. Even though it requires a reboot to install, you need to actually do a further reboot to complete the process.

To see if this was the case I checked after the latest update and there it was again.

Rebooted and it has gone.

the tip on "disnoted" process worked for me

this process had multiple instances running, and one was locking up the CPU with over 300% usage

force quit that, and other hanging processes and apps unfroze

With both 10.11 and 10.12, I had a similar issue. Running Disk Utility found and fixed many problems resulting in a solution in my case.

Try running this program and then copy and paste the output in a reply. The program was created by Etresoft, a frequent contributor. Please use copy and paste as screen shots can be hard to read.

Etrecheck – System Information

I had the same issue that Amacuser2568 and spodonahue describe. After reading this thread, I tried resetting the NVRAM, and it worked like a charm. Thanks for the advice!

My system instability continues, which is frustrating. Has anyone tried resetting the NVRAM? A friend of mine who has substantial IT experience said that he had this problem in an earlier version of OS X and resetting the NVRAM (which, in the past was called PRAM) solved the problem. I am hesitant to do this without a clearer sense of whether or not this might be useful. (Instructions on doing so can be found at this article: How to Reset NVRAM on your Mac - Apple Support.)

In the meantime, I have been rebooting my machine every couple of days. Its a terrible solution, but prevents the machine from hanging down at inopportune moments.

Since my last post I had no problems - until the next El Capitan update. This stuffed up my wifi again and started causing the odd slowdown. To pre-empt any issues I decided to delete all the relevant wifi prefs http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/16/fix-wi-fi-problems-mac-os-x-el-capitan/ and voila! So far, so good. I think escrowsec... and keychain circle... have issues when this is happening.

Plus i have not had an issue with distnoted since my last posts either.

I have an update from my initial post months ago. Unfortunately, the problem is far from solved. When I get the slow-down or freeze--and the spinning beachball of death--and the "disnoted" process shows as the CPU hog in my Activity Monitor, I can force quit that process, and things return to normal. More often than not, however, "kernel task" is the offender, and both "escrow security alert" and "keychain circle notification" show as not responding. This is the one common denominator to the problem. You can't force quit kernel task. So when that happens, all is lost. The only solution is a hard restart. I use my computer all day at work, and it happens as many as a half dozen times a day, sometimes in quick succession. It is immensely annoying. I've spoken with Apple Support twice. Went through a lot of processes, as they tried their "usual suspects." No help. The second guy seemed more helpful than the first, but even so, when I asked what "keychain circle notification" and "escrow security alert" were, he admitted he had no idea. So I am at a loss for my next move. I have not tried resetting the NVRAM, as some have suggested here, so maybe that's a next step. Others, however, have said it doesn't help.

I have thad the same issue. I was in the beta program and posted it there and got no responses at all to this problem. Unfortunately it seems to be present in the normal public release of 10.11.5 as well. Anyway, I deleted anything to do with Spotlight a week ago, reindexed my hard drive and the problem seemed to go away. Until today. Only 3 days after I installed the update from the public beta to the general release.

Exactly the same problems are occurring as you guys mention, with the same two apps showing as non-responsive.

Nobody, I repeat, nobody has even bothered to offer any ideas on this in the 2-3 months I have been talking about this problem, so I don't hold out much hope.

By the way, resetting the NVRAM and SMC does nothing.

Ok, just happened again. The distnoted process running amok was the User one in my case (no mbsetup).

Seems to have something to do with Mail app also. The following happened:

- Woke up iMac

- Tried to send an email

- Realized iMac is starting to hang

- Located and killed distnoted process in Activity Monitor (which I keep running all the time atm)

- Had to kill Mail app also

- Everything is running fine without reboot