MacOS – “routined” and why is it eating the CPU

cpumacos

After my fans started blazing, I checked top and found that a process named routined was using 60-70% cpu. Surprisingly, I found no information about this process via Google, other than a mention of it in relation to a keychain issue which doesn't apply to me.

Anybody know what this process is doing?

The process was owned by my user, but after killing it, it came back running as root. After a minute or so, the cpu usage droped to 0.

macOS Catalina 10.15.2 on a MacBook Pro

Best Answer

I had the same issue and installing the combo update https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2030 has solved it for me.

Update:

I have been too optimistic about the combo update because after a few days I noticed it didn't actually solved it for me and ended up completely disabling the service. Do the following:

sudo mount -rw /
sudo mv /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.routined.plist /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.routined.plist.disabled

Then reboot the system.

Related Question