MacOS – sharedfilelistd and distnoted hog CPU

cpumacosperformance

I understand from my findings on the topic that sharedfilelistd is an "agent that is used by applications to read/modify recent documents/servers/hosts" and distnoted a "distributed notification services".

What I don't understand is why those two process very frequently start using between 130 and 200% of CPU (Monitor).

I tried various combinations of apps loaded or not that would be causing the problem, but I was unable to discern a pattern.

I can't tie this issue with any noticeable event (update, install, config tweak, …).

Any idea ? (while I continue looking into possible causes)

Config:
MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015)
High Sierra 10.13.4
2,2 GHz Intel Core i7
8 Go 1600 MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 Mo

Best Answer

I had the same problem with sharedfilelistd consistently taking over 100% of my CPU. I don't have file sharing enabled.

I opened up Terminal and found the processes with pgrep -lf sharedfilelistd, noticing two of them running; that might have indicated a problem. I killed both with sudo pkill sharedfilelistd and they terminated and one restarted, presumably via launchd.

After the single process returned, it took between 30-75% of my CPU, perhaps averaging 50%, and my machine is back to normal. There might be some impact to some service I'm not aware of or do not use, but this worked for me.

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