Reloading Your Mac Works!

This is just informational, something a lot of people know (including me) but figured it would be an interesting case study if someone gets into the same boat.

Back when I was a Windows user (and since one of my company still does IT support for thousands of Windows users it still applies) there was always a constant need to reload Windows on "power user" computers. When Windows was my primary OS I habitually reloaded my system from scratch (technically an image with my "core load", but still) at most every quarter or so because Windows got increasingly unstable.

Once I moved to Mac full-time for myself and my entire company that became a thing of the past. Heck, I have a handful of my employees still using 2010 Mac Pro's that still work amazingly fast. I found I could go years without a reload - or at least until new macOS's came out since it seems about 50% of the time the upgrade caused some kind of annoyance.

Well, here I am on my MacBook Pro and was dealing with a super frustrating problem. My fan would go nuts on me since around November and kernel_task would take up to 4000% CPU! When this happened my system would come to a crawl and be unusable until kernel_task settled down, which was generally about 5-10 minutes. This happened once or twice a week. Then five times a week. Then once a day. Then multiple times a day. Then almost constant. I knew the task was when the CPU hit 100% and the fan was trying to cool the CPU but, holy crap, it was unusable.

For the past two months (I've been too busy to reload) I've had to not watch any videos and load any large images and stay away from heavy graphic sites (like news sites - I mention this because someone is going to comment on that like a 12 year old....) because they all sent my computer into a tizzy. For the past few days I couldn't even use my soft-phone or things like Pages because my keystrokes were 15-20 second behind when I actually made them.

I knew I needed to reload but called on Apple's new "always here and always free" support (which is awesome by the way) and after being escalated a few times it was determined "yea, you need to reload". I hoped I could escape the painful reload of my main computer but, alas, I couldn't.

So, it's the next day and WOW! Kernel_task never gets over 10-15% and the fan does its job for a very short time and goes back to normal with zero degradation in my system performance.

The moral of the story is that if you have an annoying problem then it's worth doing a full backup (I love SuperDuper for this) and wipe the drive and start fresh because it does work .

Did you wipe and re-partition the drive? If so, there's a really good chance that what happened was you fixed a bad directory error by erasing the entire directory and reinstalling.

DiskWarrior fixes directories without this reloading.

Diskwarrior didn't help any issues unfortunately. I'm a big Diskwarrior fan as well.

C4W - what do you mean by reload. Full re-install or just backup drive, load Mac OS and copy everything back? I ask because my CPU is continually maxing out with Indigo at 99%+ and spinning beach ball. I have to do something about that!

C4W - what do you mean by reload. Full re-install or just backup drive, load Mac OS and copy everything back? I ask because my CPU is continually maxing out with Indigo at 99%+ and spinning beach ball. I have to do something about that!

From scratch, wipe out the drive and load macOS from a thumb and reinstall everything (or restore data/apps from a backup). It has made a huge difference. I still have issues but not nearly as often.

However, I tend to take a total snapshot of my system after a fresh load, then after a fresh load + my core apps if I ever want to revert back quickly. I use SuperDuper for this - so you could just restore a pristine image instead of a from-scratch reload too.

Whow. Don't think I could face re-installing every piece of software but perhaps restoring from backup would be doable. I know it probably makes sense. (I'll probably give up, see sense and do it!) Thanks.

[jay (support)]

Start by disabling all plugins to see if that stops it. If it does, then start reenabling them one at a time until you find the culprit.

Is it the Mac client or the Indigo Server that's using all the CPU? What other things are running on the Mac?

I totally agree. I spent a lot of time analyzing the Acitivty Monitor and top to see what was causing the problem and spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to fix the problem before exercising the nuclear option.

Thanks both. I’ll try this approach when I’m home again tonight.

Thanks both. I’ll try this approach when I’m home again tonight.

Don't be afraid to reach out to AppleCare, if you are running a current OS (released in last 2 years) you will get free support. Worst case they will help make sure you are backed up and restore everything after a full reinstall if that is actually necessary.