What could cause a cumulative slowness that manifests itself as high WindowServer CPU usage in High Sierra

high sierraperformance

My system is a MBPro with the GT750M graphics card, mainly using Chrome/Opera

After a day or two of regular usage, it's clear something is accumulating and eventually causing a slowness that shows itself as high WindowServer CPU usage

It's only high CPU usage on WindowServer, no high ram usages etc. – however, since we can't see the GPU Ram stats, I suspect it could be a persistent GPU memory leak (Closing everything doesn't solve the issue, only a reboot does)

I'm out of ideas myself

(This happened right away after installing High Sierra, a reboot delayed the issue for 1-2 days, it seems to happen again and again, so my theories might be wrong too)

Edit: Seems to be a common issue: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8122451?start=0&tstart=0

Best Answer

I resolved this on the same system by installing the 10.13.2 supplemental update, and then the .104 version of the NVIDIA Driver Manager. (the installers are very picky about versions, so pick whichever matches your OS version here; nothing before .104 installed right for me https://www.tonymacx86.com/nvidia-drivers/ )

Restart, and then switch to the NVIDIA Web Driver from the manager:

(edit: driver helped for a while but the memory leak came back. sigh. back to not having scaled mode available on external screens...)

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MacOS – Mac app to show cumulative CPU usage

You'll want sa and accton commands to dump accounting information to a file.

Here's an article that's a bit old. The perl script at the end works well - look out for * characters in the shell - those might need to get filtered or the input sanitized if the perl script doesn't show you totals.

MacOS – Process “ubd” high CPU usage

By observing log messages in ~/Library/Logs/Ubiquity/<my username>/, I realized that Ubiquity (iCloud process) kept trying to create a file in a folder that doesn't exist:

ubiquity log

I opened up the Terminal and created this directory and its parent directories up to .ubd:

cd ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/
sudo mkdir .ubd && cd .ubd
sudo mkdir peer-E2B13E4F-56F7-C79B-1621-E30738B638FE-v23 && cd peer-E2B13E4F-56F7-C79B-1621-E30738B638FE-v23
sudo mkdir ftr

Then I changed the newly created directories' owner from root to myself:

cd ../..
sudo chown -R <my username> .ubd/

The fan turned silent instantly.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Mac app to show cumulative CPU usage

MacOS – Process “ubd” high CPU usage

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