What is Fseventsd | Fix Fseventsd High CPU or Memory Usage

[Enrique Chang]

Fseventsd, standing for “File System Events Daemon,” is a launch daemon in macOS that’s responsible for monitoring changes to files and directories on your Mac and notifying other processes that have registered an interest in these changes.

It also works with external drives that are formatted with a file system that supports file system events, such as mac OS Extended or APFS.

The fseventsd process runs in the background and is used by various applications to track file system events, such as file manager (Finder), system-wide search tool (Spotlight), backup and synchronization utilities (Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper), Cloud storage software (Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive) and development tools (Xcode or Visual Studio Code).

For instances, when you save a file on Mac, fseventsd can monitor the change and notify Finder so that it can update the file system in real-time or inform Spotlight so that it can updates its index to reflect the change. Or when you create a Time Machine backup, fseventsd is needed so that Time Machine knows all the changes made to your system since the last backup.

Repair your Mac using Disk Utility First Aid
You can also run First Aid to identify and repair any file system errors that may be causing fseventsd to hog CPU or memory resources. Simply open Disk Utility and click View > Show All Devices to display the disks and volumes on your Mac.

Then you can select a disk and click the First Aid button to check and repair it. Remember to start from the physical disk first, then move on to the volume or partition until every disk and volume is repaired.

Update apps, extensions and macOS
If an app is not working properly when fseventsd is using an unusually high amount of CPU, consider updating it and the extensions you added to it. Sometimes, the incompatible extension is where the problem lies. If updating the app doesn’t work, you can also update your operating system to eliminate bugs and glitches rendering the CPU spike.

Deal with Time Machine
Many cases of the “fseventsd high CPU” issue are also related to Time Machine.

If you have enabled Time Machine to automatically back up your Mac, you can disable it and restart your Mac to stop the excessive CPU usage of fseventsd.

If Time Machine hangs at a certain backup, you can delete its folder on the backup disk and restart the process.

Besides, you can create a directory called .fseventsd and add a files called “no_log” inside it using Terminal to stop the fseventsd process from improperly logging your drive. This disables the logging feature of the fseventsd process but it will continue to function normally and inform Time Machine of changes in the file system.

Open Terminal from the Applications/Utilities folder.
Type cd, then drag and drop your Time Machine backup disk into Terminal and press Enter.cd volume_path
Execute the following command to create the .fseventsd folder on the external drive. mkdir .fseventsd
Run another command to add the no_log file:touch no_log
Check if fseventsd still takes up high CPU or memory.
If fseventsd ceases to have high CPU consumption on your Mac, you can share this article to benefit more users!

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