Accountsd is eating up memory on my MacBook

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Level 1

14 points

Accountsd is eating up memory on my MacBook

I'm using a new MacBook Pro 15" with MacOS Sierra (10.12.5) with 16G RAM and 2.6GHz CPU. I moved to this laptop a couple of months ago and since then I experienced these symptoms.

The system gradually slows down and at some point it starts asking me force quit different applications. I looked at Activity Monitor and I noticed that at such points accountsd is using 20G+ of memory. I tried to recover different ways, even killing accountsd but each time the only real solution was rebooting the machine.

Since the last reboot 3 days ago I started to watch accountsd. It's memory consumption stated low, definitely below 1G. However, over the 3 days it gradually climbed up, now it's close to 10G. This is by far the biggest consumer of memory. See the screenshot from activity monitor:

I found some articles talking about excessive CPU usage and accountsd, but CPU usage is normal. Besides, the cause of those was use of Mail.app but I'm using Thunderbird. I also suspected Calendar (which I'm using) but the memory usage was climbing even when I completely shut down the Calendar.

At this point I'm clueless, any help is greatly appreciated.

-g

MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS Sierra (10.12.5)

Posted on Jul 9, 2017 2:08 PM

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Answer 1

GPecsy Author

Level 1

14 points

Jul 10, 2017 7:17 AM in response to Kappy

My laptop has 16G physical memory while accountsd was using 20G+ virtual memory. Obviously not all of that was kept in the physical memory at the same time but it was using it actively enough to render my computer completely useless.

See an updated screenshot, this was the increase since yesterday:

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

361,995 points

Jul 9, 2017 2:45 PM in response to GPecsy

Unless you have more than 24GBs of RAM installed, it would be impossible for any app to use 20GBs. I believe you are referring to something other than memory (RAM.) That means you are looking at the wrong information in Activity Monitor. The following links will be helpful:

Use Activity Monitor to Kill Runaway Processes

Use Activity Monitor on your Mac

Runaway applications can shorten battery runtime, affect performance, and increase heat and fan activity.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,995 points

Jul 10, 2017 12:34 PM in response to GPecsy

That isn't truly helpful because there are different types of memory you can display depending on what you select in AM. Show the following but select the entire window not just one line. Be sure to set the View menu to display All Processes.

Accountsd should not use that much memory, I'm guessing. Have you tried killing it in AM? Unfortunately, I don't know what accountsd does, but if you check in the Console app you should see what it is doing and perhaps what is causing it to build up as it is.

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Answer 4

Kappy

Level 10

361,995 points

Jul 10, 2017 1:15 PM in response to Kappy

Sorry, but I forgot this:

Display CPU% in descending order and show as much of the entire list as possible in the snapshot.

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