Big Sur Overheating and Battery Life Issues

[Lycanthrope]

Hi Folks, snce installing Big Sur Public Beta, the battery life on both my MBP's (2020 16" & Late 2013 15") has been dreadful, obviously because it has been overheating like crazy, fans constantly on, regardless of what I was doing.

I initially thought this was just a general issue and waited for the next iteration, but no change, same problem.

This morning I knuckled-down to investigate and relatively quickly found the issue, which was a process kernelmanagerd killing the CPU, digging deeper, I found it linked to Sophos Home, uninstalled that, issue solved!

TL;DR Unistall Sophos Home

 

[Loog]

Thanks for this, I've just started looking to see if there was anyone else seeing issues with Big Sur for battery and fans and boom, straight to this...And yes I have sophos on here albeit the upgrade did break it. ?I was hanging on in the hope that it would be fixed shortly. Think I'll take the same approach and lose this for now to see if the stability returns. I've also seen a large decrease in battery health, which was on 94% and now shows 88% which isn't helpful. Not sure if this is linked but it seems suspicious to me. I may try a reset of the SMC controller when the official version is out to see if that restores balance.

 

[Konigi]

I was experiencing the same problem on the official release of Big Sur 11.0.1. Contacted Sophos, and they were not aware of the issue. So far, after 20 minutes, the issue has not been solved: fans still working at fast pace, and huge battery drain. Could be something else?

 

[youme]

Start terminal and type "top" ... check on top of the list for any suspicious process (i.e. constant high percentage next to the process name).

 

[Konigi]

So it was Dropbox in the end (many thanks!). Anyone had the same issue? Any workaround, or a known fix coming up?

 

[Pahanda]

Experiencing the same on my late 2016 15" MBP. Couldn't identify any app so far causing this.

 

[venom600]

Same problem on my 2019 16". I have no idea what is causing it, other than kernelmanagerd going crazy.

 

[EvianPS]

Hi! I have MBP 15" 2017. It also has this overheating issue and I am desperate to find solution. I don't have Sophos app, however the top one is lghub and I don't know what it is. Is it Logitech G Hub App?

 

[Pahanda]

Resetting the NVRAM did the job for me.

 

[iChan]

Resetting the NVRAM did the job for me.

I had the same overheating/excessive CPU usage too... an NVRAM reset solved it for me.

I recall updating to Catalina from Mojave caused the same problem, which was resolved with the same fix. Thanks to the OP for bringing it up and you for the reminder!

 

[orthorim]

3 apps known to cause problems
- Malwarebytes
- Sophos Home
- Karabiner Elements (this was the culprit for me, I removed that and kernelmanagerd was back down to 0 CPU, it had been continuously spiking 100% before, and had used must of my total CPU time and battery drain)

Chances are there's other apps with the same issues.

I'll do the NVRAM reset also, just in case.

I still have horrible issues with Docker but I think that's due to Docker, not Big Sur. Docker has 30% CPU sitting idle... really bad.

 

[McCutchMcCutch]

2020 intel i5 MBP ^ Big Sur overheating even with xt5700 egpu with most apps ZOOm, lightroom, photoshop, final cut now crashes when saving very light work.