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Oftentimes, after I wake my Mac from sleep, powerd (which is the power management daemon? Which in particular deals with sleeping the Mac and waking it?) uses high CPU, usually around 25% to 50% on my i7 CPU.

Anyone know how I can find out what's causing it, and what I can do to fix it? It seems to be a problem with waking from sleep but I don't know what.

This problem started happening after I updated my Mac Mini to 10.10.2, a few weeks ago.

Gary
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    I would look in the Console to see what is it doing! – Ruskes Mar 04 '15 at 18:11
  • I don't see anything relevant in the Console. There have been no relevant items in the past 30 minutes, and filtering for powerd shows one line: 15/03/04 12:27:27.000 am kernel[0]: PM response took 3152 ms (26, powerd) which seems to be when I put the Mac to sleep. – Gary Mar 04 '15 at 18:41
  • How much Memory is it using ? I have it at 0 CPU and 1 MB memory – Ruskes Mar 04 '15 at 18:47
  • powerd is at 25% CPU and 30 MB memory. – Gary Mar 04 '15 at 18:54
  • hmm, type "power" in the console filter (not powerd) to see what is switching on/off, it should be Airport and HDMI ect.. – Ruskes Mar 04 '15 at 19:32
  • After typing power in the Console, the last event is 3 hours ago so I don't think that should be related to the current high CPU usage from powerd? The items in the Console after filtering for powerd seem to be from when I slept/wake my Mac, and that's it. – Gary Mar 04 '15 at 19:51
  • The percentage in Activity Monitor is per core, so 25% is really more like 3% of the total CPU… not enough to worry about. – Tetsujin Mar 04 '15 at 21:02
  • Yes, that's true, but it should still be below 10%. Something is making it 25% or more, that probably shouldn't be happening. Sometimes, when it hits 75%, I restart my Mac so that it drops back down to 1% or so. – Gary Mar 04 '15 at 21:06
  • Also have this problem on a Yosemite server of mine, but not with any of the laptops. A reboot solves it, but I don't know how it gets into this state! Hmm – wojo Mar 09 '15 at 01:13
  • I was running into this same issue, and restarting caused the same craziness with Activity Monitor that std.denis mentioned. Updates were coming in at 10-20 per second maybe more. VMware was the only application that was really going crazy however. Do you run VMWare, and did you have a virtual server running? It seems possible that there's some confusion going on with between the host and the virtual server when it comes to going to sleep. I am on 10.10.3, VMWare fusion 7.1.1 – vieroski May 28 '15 at 17:03
  • I should clarify, restarting powerd only, not the entire machine. – vieroski May 28 '15 at 17:04
  • More on this question, powerd taking CPU% big time. Mac Mini mid-2011, 10.10.3 ... No apps running, after two minutes the fan starts going fast 5500 RPM! Activity Monitor says powerd is using lots of CPU% with all other processes way less. NO apps running! Restarted, no improvement. Quit powerd and and quite Activity Monitor, then restarted. Waiting to see how long it takes for powerd to take over again. Just what is powerd??? –  Jun 03 '15 at 23:24
  • I didn't initially notice this problem because of the CPU usage, but because I had the 'Network' tab open in activity monitor and despite no applications using the internet, every few seconds it would show a huge burst in incoming and outgoing packets (about 1,000,000 packets in and out a second.) – William Turrell Sep 02 '15 at 08:49
  • The comment of @William Turrell is a pretty good hint of a probable cause of power misbehaviour. Under heavy network attack, a Mac CPU will climb naturally. If you don't have the habit of looking at your firewall and network logs, it is the time to start now. Attacks coming through a wireless interface from a poor connection will cause a high power usage, and hence the need to frequently monitor it. – dan Oct 20 '15 at 07:10
  • I think this may be a bitcoin mining trojan. My internet connection was slow so I checked the transfer statistics on my access point and it was saturated. Nobody else is connected so I figured it must be my computer. After checking Activity Monitor I noticed powerd using a suspicious amount of CPU. Killing the process not only freed up CPU but the bandwidth usage dropped to nil. – Evan Plaice Jan 04 '16 at 01:21
  • I had several kernel panics on cold start caused by the watchdog due to long boot with a bunch of tx_flush logs on my disk and one of the verbose logs was exactly this. powerd stressed my CPU for 180 seconds causing a long boot, so the watchdog caused a kernel panic. After booting in BOOTCAMP once and booting back to Mac, it's fixed, but I'm afraid to shutdown now. What is this, Apple? >.> – Martin Braun Aug 12 '22 at 08:36

8 Answers8

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sudo kill -HUP $(pgrep powerd)

(I don't have an answer for 'why')

Tyler A.
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    More succintly, sudo pkill -HUP powerd – danorton Jun 05 '15 at 12:54
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    seems that it restarts on HUP, so just an ordinary TERM might do the same job. If only they'd documented anything about the daemon in the man pages. – jrg Oct 19 '15 at 08:59
  • If @AndyDent is correct (below), then this is a non-problem, only active when you run ActivityMonitor to see if it's active. – Joshua Goldberg May 23 '16 at 21:16
  • top -o cpu shows all processes running ordered by CPU. powerd with Activity Monitor running is (for me) ~15% cpu usage. Close Activity Monitor. powerd is now 0.1%. – Baker Nov 04 '16 at 20:42
  • I just needed this answer, and might have a tiny clue about "why".

    This happened to me when my game that I am coding crashed with a segmentation fault.

    The OS is supposed to detect segfault and block it (and crash the program that caused it), I guess OSX isn't good enough regarding that and let my little game corrupt the system processes somehow. Or its own exception handling caused a bug in their own processes.

     – speeder Dec 01 '16 at 20:28
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sudo pmset schedule cancelall fixed it for me.

After updating from macOS Ventura beta 3 to beta 4, powerd was using 100% CPU even after restarting it.

pmset -g log repeatedly printed

2022-07-28 23:54:10 +0100 Assertions            PID 117(powerd) TimedOut InternalPreventSleep "com.apple.powermanagement.wakeschedule" 00:00:04  id:0x0xd00008a28 [System: PrevIdle DeclUser kDisp]

pmset -g sched showed two scheduled events:

Scheduled power events:
 [0]  wake at 04/12/62 00:47:16 by 'com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.email.SendLaterDelivery' User visible: true
 [1]  wake at 04/12/62 00:47:16 by 'com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.email.SendLaterDelivery' User visible: true

pmset schedule cancelall removed these two and powerd CPU immediately dropped off.

grg
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Have you tried to stop powerd by Activity Monitor? This solved the CPU consumption for me.

But after stopping powerd I got strange effect in Activity Monitor - it was like Update Frequency was changed from Often (2 sec) to Nonstop (0 sec), i.e. continuous without any delay. So I had to quit Activity Monitor too.

After these operations and restart of Activity Monitor all works fine.

std.denis
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  • From how you describe it, it doesn't sound like a good solution then. I agree that restarting the Mac is often the best way to fix these runaway processes. – Gary Mar 07 '15 at 20:20
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    Not sure if full restart of Mac on every failure of some utility is rather good option. If that utility does not affect stability of the system. – std.denis Mar 07 '15 at 21:10
  • Okay I'll kill it to see how that goes, next time. But I'm looking for a more permanent, long-term solution. – Gary Mar 08 '15 at 03:04
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    I did the same thing, and saw what you were talking about in the Activity Monitor -- but if you look closely, you'll see that what's actually happening is that the Activity Monitor itself was backed up, and it is executing updates in rapid succession to try to catch up. Mine was backlogged for a couple days (on a little-used machine) it looks like and is taking awhile to catch up. – Kem Mason Jul 10 '15 at 23:36
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On my computer, it was Activity Monitor which caused the powerd process to use a lot of cpu (20-30%, sometimes 50%, resetting the SMC didn't help). Quitting Activity Monitor "solved" the problem. Checked in the Terminal by running top.

user3145800
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    Doing a process sample of powerd suggest that Activity Monitor might keep fetching the energy impact info from it. – jturcotte Dec 05 '15 at 17:34
  • Yep, worked for me. – rahmu Dec 12 '16 at 17:45
  • Who'd have thunk it? I would never have thought that Activity Monitor would be responsible but certainly seems to be the culprit on my machine. Thanks for the suggestion. – user1718097 Jul 18 '17 at 10:33
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I use iStatMenus to monitor a range of things and it confirms that powerd is only using a lot of CPU whilst Activity Monitor is running. At other times, it does not appear on the high CPU users list.

Andy Dent
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    I find this claim more than a little doubtful. It certainly does not match a logical evaluation of my experiences. 1) System is running slowly for some inexplicable reason. 2) Open Activity Monitor to investigate. 3) powerd appears to be the culprit. (Yes this doesn't contradict your claim, but...) 4) Kill powerd 5) Suddenly performance improves. (This strongly suggests powerd is the culprit, and perhaps iStatMenus is does not live up to you faith in it. ;)) – Disillusioned Mar 05 '18 at 11:41
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You need to reset your SMC. Just like another answer i don't have the why but i have the solution.

 Mac mini, iMac, Mac Pro

Shut down your Mac, unplug the power chord, wait for 30 seconds, plug the power cord, wait for 5 seconds, start your Mac.

MacBook

Shut down your Mac, press Shift+Ctrl+Alt first and then press the power button. It should not start. Take a look at the LED from your power cord and it should just change for few seconds. Then, release the Shift+Ctrl+Alt and start your Mac.

Community
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Nicolas Guérinet
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    and the rationale? – hbogert Aug 31 '15 at 13:11
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    Could you improve your answer so as to look less like prayer movements :).
    How is diagnosed the "You need"?     – dan Oct 20 '15 at 07:18
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    Reseting the SMC doesn't help, it's restarting the computer that helps. The longest my uptime, the more powerd will take (only when Activity Monitor is running). I haven't restarted for 10 days now and it's taking 50% of one core. This goes away if I restart. – jturcotte Feb 05 '16 at 15:34
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On the Apple web page: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac it is discusses when and why you should reset your SMC (System Management Controller). It doesn't mention this problem, but at least it lets you know a bit more about what resetting the SMC means!

I have this powerd problem too at the moment.

To reset the SMC on Intel-based Mac Pro, iMac, and Mac mini computers, you need to:

  1. Shut down the computer.
  2. Unplug the power cord.
  3. Wait fifteen seconds.
  4. Attach the power cord.
  5. Wait five seconds, then press the power button to turn on the computer.
kenorb
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Nigel Martin
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    Today I still had the powerd problem (25-45% use of a cpu). I shut down apps one at a time in case it was one app causing the problem, but powerd continued to hog a cpu. I then restarted, and that fixed the problem. As has been commented above, the activity monitor seemed to be playing catchup for a few seconds after the restart, showing data that was collected (I assume) before the restart. During this time the monitor updates came fast, and showed powerd still using 40% cpu. After a few seconds the monitor settled down, and powerd had disappeared from the monitor list of cpu users. – Nigel Martin Oct 08 '15 at 16:00
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I have the same issue with powerd using up more than one core of CPU on my 2019 16" MacBook Pro on macOS Catalina 10.15.7, and also making my system super slow (despite it "only" consuming a little over one core out of eight). [Edit: The issue is still present on macOS Big Sur 11.1.]

Solutions that did not work:

  1. sudo pkill -HUP powerd (it would immediately restart and resume hogging my CPU)
  2. closing Activity Monitor
  3. closing Intel Power Gadget
  4. unplugging all of my Thunderbolt 3 devices and power adapters
  5. rebooting
  6. resetting my SMC

Problem/Symptoms:

So I opened up Console.app and noticed the following repeatedly:

Process powerd.154 TimedOut UserIsActive "com.apple.powermanagement.wakeschedule" age:00:00:01 id:38654738880 [System: DeclUser kDisp] macOS Console App repeatedly showing: Process powerd.154 TimedOut UserIsActive "com.apple.powermanagement.wakeschedule"

Solution:

This tipped me off to this Reddit post. In it, u/iTim314 notes that he needed to go to System Preferences > Energy Saver > Schedule, and to specify something. I chose the least annoying values possible: enter image description here

After clicking OK, this immediately fixed my powerd problems. No more powerd warnings in Console.app, powerd was no longer hogging my CPU, and my system immediately became more responsive. If I uncheck both of these values and save again, the problem immediately reappears. And so on. (The Joker: "Ta-dah! It's GONE!")

Notes

Unfortunately, this is a workaround, not a true solution, but I'm hopeful this helps others figure out a proper solution or bugfix.

Hypothesis

After writing this post, it hit me: This problem seemingly started occurring after I went into the "Energy Saver schedule" dialog two days ago. I took a look, checked (one or) both options, maybe saved my changes (I don't remember), then unchecked the options, and then maybe saved again (if I saved the first time). I've had this MacBook Pro for over a year now (and other MacBook Pros for over a decade) without experiencing this issue, so this probably isn't a coincidence. I'm left wondering if a corrupt .plist is being written for these settings...

Jonathan Wheeler
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