3 ms·

There is no reason to care about this. There's two or three different mechanisms that stop background processes from having any effect on actual work you're doi

There is no reason to care about this. There's two or three different mechanisms that stop background processes from having any effect on actual work you're doing. (Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.) If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby. As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.

gopher_space 2y ago
If you were able to keep your housekeeping out of my way I wouldn’t have been looking at metrics in the first place. The “bug” here is system activity I’m not deliberately invoking.
- astrange 2y ago
  "System activity" isn't a valuable user metric because not all CPU %s are equal and CPU % isn't a consumable resource. Fans, battery life, case temperature, some others are. System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
- blackqueeriroh 2y ago
  Is it impacting your actual usage? If not, it’s just yak shaving.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    How could I possibly know? That's my whole point!
  - josephg 2y ago
    This might be a bit autistic of me, but I don’t trust that random processes sitting on 100% cpu are serving me in any way. I don’t think I want this sort of background process to run on my computer at all. Are those programs written well, or are they using so many cycles because they’re inefficient and slow? And when did I ever opt in to this? Spotlight has slowly gotten more and more horrible over time. Half the time I use it to invoke system preferences it can’t find it. Or it can’t find the applications folder. If Spotlight is this terrible, why is the hard disk indexer so busy? Is it any better engineered than spotlight? I doubt it. Likewise, I don’t want photoanalysisd looking at my photos. I don’t use that “photos by person” feature. Why does it use hour upon hour of cpu time to make this feature available - just in case I use it later I guess? Get lost. I really wish Apple stopped adding random crappy features to macOS that I don’t use - but which burn cpu cycles. Instead, fix your shit. Indexing is fine if you make spotlight actually be good again. Photo analysis is useful if I decide it’s useful and turn it on. And maybe if Xcode and SwiftUI weren’t such a buggy, crash ridden, undocumented mess, then maybe, maybe, I’d trust you more to run random background processes. As it stands, I don’t trust Apple - particularly their application teams - to be good custodians of my cpu.
  - RunSet 2y ago
    The bluetooth stack in MacOS does not work with wiimotes since Monterey. https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-wiimote-pairing-macos-monterey https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-wiimote-pairing-macos-... The bluetooth stack in Windows and Linux does. Apple's official position is that my wiimotes are the problem and I should buy an Apple supported bluetooth game controller. Presumably one of these four controllers: https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/gaming https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/gaming
josephg 2y ago
You say that - and then I looked up and saw AMPDevicesAgent sitting at 95% CPU for the past - well, who knows how long. What even is that? Oh, some iphone sync thing. Why is it running while my laptop is on battery? I don't want my battery going flat in order to background sync my phone. In fact, I turned background phone sync off in finder a few days ago. Why is it even running? Are these processes behaving properly or is it in some stupid infinite loop? I can't tell. Is it considered acceptable by apple for background processes to make my efficiency cores sit at 100% utilisation more or less all the time - even when I'm on battery power? How much will that reduce my laptop's battery life? I can't tell. I have no way to tell. Its all an opaque jungle of processes running processes. Half of them are buggy half the time, and I don't know which half. It gets more complex and stupid every year. I swear, macos seemed to run better 10 years ago when I had a computer that was many times slower. Strangely, at the time, there were no constant background processes chewing up CPU all the time like this. Tell me, how is any of this stuff making my computing experience better? I think my preferred computer has a fast, modern CPU and software from a decade or two ago. Off the top of my head, I can't name a single feature added in macos in the last decade that I actually care about. (Excluding support for modern hardware.)
- astrange 2y ago
  > I can't tell. I have no way to tell. If the battery life is less than you expect then there's a problem. I think that's pretty easy to notice. It sounds like that's a bug though, you should report it. Posting on random forums about it won't cause it to get fixed.
  - josephg 2y ago
    Huh? I don't find battery life to be that easy to notice. Most of the time I use my laptop, I'm at home - and I'm only on battery power because I sat on the couch and I'm too lazy to reach over and plug my laptop in. The battery goes flat sometimes on zoom calls, or when streaming. But I don't know how many hours I should expect the battery to last while on a zoom call. The only way I could tell that my battery life has gone down would be by doing actual tests - but those are notoriously difficult - because I can't use my laptop at the same time. (Or, I guess I can - but I'd need to use it the same way across tests). It sounds like days of work to test my battery life with and without transient background tasks. I don't even know how I'd test that - because I don't know how to turn all that stuff off for the control. I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly. I hear you that complaining online probably won't help. But can't see how complaining about battery life in feedback assistant would help either. The situation is crappy.

gopher_space 2y ago

If you were able to keep your housekeeping out of my way I wouldn’t have been looking at metrics in the first place. The “bug” here is system activity I’m not deliberately invoking.

astrange 2y ago
"System activity" isn't a valuable user metric because not all CPU %s are equal and CPU % isn't a consumable resource. Fans, battery life, case temperature, some others are. System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
blackqueeriroh 2y ago
Is it impacting your actual usage? If not, it’s just yak shaving.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  How could I possibly know? That's my whole point!
- josephg 2y ago
  This might be a bit autistic of me, but I don’t trust that random processes sitting on 100% cpu are serving me in any way. I don’t think I want this sort of background process to run on my computer at all. Are those programs written well, or are they using so many cycles because they’re inefficient and slow? And when did I ever opt in to this? Spotlight has slowly gotten more and more horrible over time. Half the time I use it to invoke system preferences it can’t find it. Or it can’t find the applications folder. If Spotlight is this terrible, why is the hard disk indexer so busy? Is it any better engineered than spotlight? I doubt it. Likewise, I don’t want photoanalysisd looking at my photos. I don’t use that “photos by person” feature. Why does it use hour upon hour of cpu time to make this feature available - just in case I use it later I guess? Get lost. I really wish Apple stopped adding random crappy features to macOS that I don’t use - but which burn cpu cycles. Instead, fix your shit. Indexing is fine if you make spotlight actually be good again. Photo analysis is useful if I decide it’s useful and turn it on. And maybe if Xcode and SwiftUI weren’t such a buggy, crash ridden, undocumented mess, then maybe, maybe, I’d trust you more to run random background processes. As it stands, I don’t trust Apple - particularly their application teams - to be good custodians of my cpu.
- RunSet 2y ago
  The bluetooth stack in MacOS does not work with wiimotes since Monterey. https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-wiimote-pairing-macos-monterey https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-wiimote-pairing-macos-... The bluetooth stack in Windows and Linux does. Apple's official position is that my wiimotes are the problem and I should buy an Apple supported bluetooth game controller. Presumably one of these four controllers: https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/gaming https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/gaming

josephg 2y ago

You say that - and then I looked up and saw AMPDevicesAgent sitting at 95% CPU for the past - well, who knows how long. What even is that? Oh, some iphone sync thing. Why is it running while my laptop is on battery? I don't want my battery going flat in order to background sync my phone. In fact, I turned background phone sync off in finder a few days ago. Why is it even running? Are these processes behaving properly or is it in some stupid infinite loop? I can't tell. Is it considered acceptable by apple for background processes to make my efficiency cores sit at 100% utilisation more or less all the time - even when I'm on battery power? How much will that reduce my laptop's battery life? I can't tell. I have no way to tell. Its all an opaque jungle of processes running processes. Half of them are buggy half the time, and I don't know which half. It gets more complex and stupid every year. I swear, macos seemed to run better 10 years ago when I had a computer that was many times slower. Strangely, at the time, there were no constant background processes chewing up CPU all the time like this. Tell me, how is any of this stuff making my computing experience better? I think my preferred computer has a fast, modern CPU and software from a decade or two ago. Off the top of my head, I can't name a single feature added in macos in the last decade that I actually care about. (Excluding support for modern hardware.)

astrange 2y ago
> I can't tell. I have no way to tell. If the battery life is less than you expect then there's a problem. I think that's pretty easy to notice. It sounds like that's a bug though, you should report it. Posting on random forums about it won't cause it to get fixed.
- josephg 2y ago
  Huh? I don't find battery life to be that easy to notice. Most of the time I use my laptop, I'm at home - and I'm only on battery power because I sat on the couch and I'm too lazy to reach over and plug my laptop in. The battery goes flat sometimes on zoom calls, or when streaming. But I don't know how many hours I should expect the battery to last while on a zoom call. The only way I could tell that my battery life has gone down would be by doing actual tests - but those are notoriously difficult - because I can't use my laptop at the same time. (Or, I guess I can - but I'd need to use it the same way across tests). It sounds like days of work to test my battery life with and without transient background tasks. I don't even know how I'd test that - because I don't know how to turn all that stuff off for the control. I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly. I hear you that complaining online probably won't help. But can't see how complaining about battery life in feedback assistant would help either. The situation is crappy.