![]() ![]() But you probably won’t see cfprefsd or cloudd unless you scroll around a bit to find them. You may notice a few daemons, processes whose names end with d, present in the list. You’ll see a long list of processes running on your Mac. In the Activity Monitor window, select the CPU button in the toolbar. When the Activity Monitor window opens, we’re going to be interested in the resources each daemon is making use of. To check on this daemon’s activity, launch Activity Monitor, located at /Applications/Utilities. A little more investigating using Terminal and the technique we outlined above tells us that this is the daemon used by CloudKit, a developer’s API used to transfer data between an app and Apple’s iCloud service. When you open an app and change one of its preferences, it’s likely that cfprefsd is the daemon being asked to make the changes to the app’s preference file.Ĭloudd: A daemon having something to do with macOS cloud services. Essentially, cfprefsd helps an app or the system to read or write to preference files. ![]() Terminal will tell us that, “cfprefsd provides preference services for the CFPreferences and NSUserDefaults APIs.” If we wanted to find out more, we could look up CFPreferences and NSUserDefaults in Apple Developer documentation. Launch Terminal, located at /Applications/Utilities, and enter the following at the Terminal prompt: You can use this trick with most of the daemons that are spawned by the operating system to discover what function they serve. ![]() ![]() )Actually, we cheated a bit and used the Terminal app to tell us what cfprefsd was. (Using the “man” command in Terminal allows you to see a description of what the daemon’s function is. Scratching our heads a bit, we can guess that this daemon has something to do with preferences, and if we knew a bit more about Mac development, we could guess the cf stood for Core Foundation. If we apply this developer logic to our two example daemons we come up with:Ĭfprefsd: A background process (a daemon because of the d at the end of the name) having something to do with cfprefs. You may notice that our two daemons have names that end with a “d.” This is a developer convention, where all daemons’ names should end with a “d.” Just as important, the rest of the daemon name should loosely describe its function. In this example, we’re going to use Activity Monitor to look at what two common Mac daemons are up to: “cfprefsd” and “cloudd.” We chose these two daemons because there have been a few questions floating around the Internet about what they do, as well as questions about these daemons using excessive resources. But if you’re curious, you can use Activity Monitor, an app included with the Mac, to see how the various daemons, and other programs that are running, are making use of your Mac’s resources. But without them, your Mac would likely grind to a halt or freeze up, possibly without even displaying the usual spinning beach ball of doom.įor the most part, daemons should be left alone they’re perfectly happy performing their assigned tasks. That makes them hard for the user to directly interact with, or even know they’re present. If we replace man with computer user, and gods with the operating system or applications, we get a reasonable idea of what all these Mac daemons are doing: performing repetitive tasks that provide a service to the operating system, an app, or the user.ĭaemons have no visible interface they run in the background and are usually independent of other apps and programs. The word daemon comes from an ancient Greek belief, and is used to describe a supernatural being that works on tasks between the gods and man. They are often used to implement or help provide a service that operating systems or applications need. Daemons, not to be confused with demons, are usually small programs that run in the background with no direct interaction with the computer user. The Mac, and for that matter most computing platforms, are just chock full of daemons. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |