Reader Comment: accountds Running Wild, Viewing Processes and Memory

2020-10-05 - SEND FEEDBACK

Related: Apple, Apple Core Rot, crapware, daemon process, memory, Photoshop, reader comment

Hans V writes:

Following the troubles you and your readers have with the diminishing stability of MacOSX, I wonder if more of your readers have been bitten by "accountsd running wild" bug?

It happened twice here and is very annoying. For me it is not yet clear how to surely stop it. The best I could think of was a bit of fiddling with some mail accounts and hoping it will go away on the next restart. I am very much interested in your and your readers experience with this nasty bug.

MPG: accountsd is a macOS daemon process (demon process?!) required for macOS to function. It has had problems in the past as well. Clearly buggy, 'hope' is not a plan but seems to be about as good as anything for accountsd. Still, it’s worth trying:

Signing out of iCloud.
Rebooting or logging out and logging back in.
Resetting SMC and.or NVRAM.

Luckily I’ve not seen this issue, but reports online of this problem make it clear that Apple has messed things up once again. It’s a damaging problem because it can seriously impair the usability of a computer, particularly a 2-core or 4-core machine—as it continuously consumes CPU time and other resources.

The number of Apple background daemon processes has skyrocketed over the past few years. Many of them are unwanted crapware that run even if the functionality they are designed for is completely disabled. A good example is 'airportd' for the Apple Airport—which I do not even have. Yet Apple always runs it, and it just gets respawned if force-killed. There are many such crapware daemon processes that run even when they are never needed.

Ditto for the huge mess of crapware daemon processes that Adobe introduces even when nothing is running or has run for hours or days.Adobe alone sometimes chews up entire gigabyte of memory—doing nothing useful. I’ve reported the problem and responded with particulars, but the issue remains, as do total system crashes when using Photoshop.