Very high CPU usage by Safari, System events.

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Level 1

12 points

Very high CPU usage by Safari, System events.

The past two weeks, my Mid-2014 Retina 13" Macbook Pro has had some issues with CPU usage.

Starting pretty much any program, but especially Safari browser, will cause the fans to work extremely hard.
Activity monitor will show that safari uses 80-100% of CPU, only browsing a single page.
When turning the macbook off via Shut Down, a "screenshot" of Safari Top Pages will display before turning off regardless of whether Safari was running when choosing Shut Down or not.
Safari often refuses to quit, and must be "force quit".
Even after force quit, it reopens itself sometimes.

I have attempted troubleshooting. Turing the system on and off, resetting SMC, uninstalling/deleting any newly installed applications etc.

Today, System Events are taking high amounts of CPU. (See picture)

I am only running Safari to write this, App Store where I'm downloading a new OS (to see if installing it will help solve the problem) and Activity Monitor.

System Events was taking a lot of juice even before I was downloading Sierra, so I don't think that's it. Strangely, Safari and Safar Web Content is not taking that much in this picture, but trust me, they regularly are at 80% and 30-40% respectively.

I have 8 GB RAM on this computer, and it's usually sufficient for most things.

I don't get it. Usually the fans will only work this hard if I'm doing video editing, photo editing or similar in Lightroom, Photoshop and very heavy programs.

Any clues/troubleshooting/help?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Jun 10, 2017 4:49 AM

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Answer 1

kaz-k

Level 8

49,038 points

Jun 10, 2017 5:36 AM in response to Styrtregn

I suppose you installed lot of Safari Extensions which eat up CPU power.

Open Safari Preferences > Extensions and disable each unused extension by clicking on the extension, then unchecking the "enable" box. Then, restart Safari could solve the problem.

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Answer 2

Allan Jones

Level 9

68,606 points

Jun 10, 2017 7:31 AM in response to Styrtregn

You can help us help you by posting a snapshot of your current config. There is way to do that in complete safety. A respected and long-serving member of these communities has created a simple utility that will take a "snapshot" of your configuration without revealing any sensitive information about you and your computer. It is Etrecheck, and is available here:

http://etrecheck.com/

Run it and, when its report displays, click Etrecheck's "Share Report" icon and then "Copy Report" from the resulting dropdown. Paste the entire report into a response to your own thread here. It will often allow us to quickly identify or eliminate software including badly written browser extensions as the problem.

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