A few days ago, the fans on my relatively new MacBook Pro M5 started ramping up, even though no resource-intensive processes were running. A check in Activity Monitor revealed that “launchservicesd” was the culprit.
Various searches on Google and Gemini suggested deleting specific preference files and caches, and eventually reinstalling macOS. I tried all of these steps—some of them multiple times. I also ran the First Aid function in Disk Utility. None of it helped. If I quit Safari, things quiet down; if I launch it again, the fan starts up again relatively quickly.
Does anyone here have any ideas on what else I could try?
Here are a few avenues for investigation, some of which may have already occurred:
In Activity Monitor, when you see high CPU for launchservicesd, how many of those processes are there (could be just one)?
When you force-quit launchservicesd from Activity Monitor, does it immediately re-launch, and immediately return to high CPU usage?
When you observe high CPU and quit Safari, do you also see the launchservicesd process quit on its own, or does it remain but no longer exhibit high CPU?
Thank you so much, Jeff {@fischej) for getting back to me.
Searching for answers to your questions was enough to narrow down the problem and solve it (again, with Gemini’s help). It turned out to be an issue with bookmark synchronization. Just today, a recently visited webpage kept appearing in Activity Monitor, alternating with “Safari Web Content (Cached).” After deleting the “Bookmarks.plist” file and letting iCloud synchronization rebuild it, the problem now appears to be resolved. All in all, it took me a few hours.
Thanks again, and have a great weekend!
