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Extreme slowing down of MacBook Pro due to pkd process

I do have FXFactory!!!!! Do you remember exactly what you deleted? I'm happy to uninstall the bastard thing entirely if it solves this problem! 🥳
 
I've uninstalled it using the app's built-in uninstaller. Hopefully that gets everything. Let's see how it goes. I'm optimistic!! If you're right, you're a legend!!! :)
 
noisyneil said:
ah man.. still there. :-(
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Make sure you delete everything having to do with FXFactory. All directories, all .fxplug files, everything. Check

/Library/Application Support/FXFactory
/Library/Caches/com.FXFactory.FXFactory
/Library/Containers/com.FXFactory.FXPlugService
/Library/Preferences/ looking for FXFactory plists
Check your Motion Templates folder for anything
Check your Applications folder for related FCPX plugins

Possibilities:

/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins
~/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Plugins
/Library/Plugins/FxPlug
~/Library/Plugins/FxPlug
/Applications/Final Cut Pro/Content/Plug-ins/ (inside the app bundle itself)

Some plugins also create folders in Application Support (on either root or home).

Thoroughly search your computer for remnants. Removal completely solved the problem for me.

I may have also removed some CoreMelt plugins I no longer use.
 
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Thanks for that! I've gone through the list and everything had already been trashed by the uninstaller, so I have two thoughts:

1) I hadn't restarted; now I have. No pkd this morning, although I've only been on for about 20min...
2) Could be one of the other FCP/Premiere plugins I have installed, so if I see pkd again I'll uninstall the bloody lot of them and reinstall as and when I need them.
 
Not to pile on, but I am having this exact issue and found that nuking the pkd process in Activity Monitor resolves the issue. I'm using a lot of the software mentioned (Chrome, Final Cut Pro X, FX Factory) and have no idea when or how the issue is triggered. This has been driving me crazy for months.

As soon as I kill the process, it comes right back and right now, I do not have any of those apps open. Is there a way to find out what app is using it?
 
beta2k said:
I am debugging this issue for several days now and slowly but surely I am going crazy :) My issue is that after startup, the MacBook is extremely slow. No icons/files are shown on the desktop. Finder cannot be opened. I can barely open the Activity Monitor. I also cannot type anything in the Terminal. The spinning ball is also appearing. It seems that something is blocking everything.

When looking at the Activity Monitor I realized that a certain pkd process is responsible for extremely slowing down my MacBook Pro. When I kill this process, everything works fine and suddenly the icons appear on the desktop and Finder can be opened. While the process is running, I cannot work with the MacBook. The issue is, that pkd seems to be some sort of daemon for "plugin kit". It frequently restarts itself. So killing it after booting is no option, because it will reappear and again slow down the system.

I created another Admin account on the MacBook. After logging in, everything works fine. So the problem seems to appear only with the other user. However, I would like to avoid to switch to a new user and install everything from scratch. I would like to identify the root cause, because maybe a specific software is responsible and then I would end up with the same problem with the new user.

This image shows the files the pkd process is connected to:

View attachment 904824

Does anyone know where this is coming from? Why does it block the laptop entirely? How can I solve this issue?

The laptop is a MacBook Pro Mid-2012 (serial number is C1MK9X6ZDTY3; it is a MacBook Pro 13-Inch "Core i5" 2.5 Mid-2012). The operating system was recently updated to Catalina 10.15.4. I also applied this script here to be able to use an old Java Version with Catalina. Could this be causing my issue? https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/java-6-runtime-legacy-version-for-macos-catalina.2195954/

Thanks for your help!
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never considered wise to post identifying numbers on forums.
 
voltaicass said:
Not to pile on, but I am having this exact issue and found that nuking the pkd process in Activity Monitor resolves the issue. I'm using a lot of the software mentioned (Chrome, Final Cut Pro X, FX Factory) and have no idea when or how the issue is triggered. This has been driving me crazy for months.

As soon as I kill the process, it comes right back and right now, I do not have any of those apps open. Is there a way to find out what app is using it?
Click to expand...
Yeah it's been driving me mad since I got my 16" MBP in May. Was fine on my old machine. Not sure if that's anything to do with moving to Catalina. I use Keyboard Maestro to run kill scripts and yes, it puts the issue to rest for the short term, but it's sure to creep back before long. Quite staggering that there's no way to isolate the process trigger.
 
It was relatively easy to do a clean install and use TieMachine or Migration Assistant - but if you did that already when the MBP 16 was new, or planning to do so when 11.01+ drops... you know it is in your account, not the 2nd account you created just to test this, so likely could be in the ~/Library

There has to be an app or even using Terminal top command variable to locate what is causing it. Is "launchd" where such thing would be launched via?
 
When I heard "FXFactory" a lightbulb went off in my head. The timing of recent effect installs and subsequent beachball slowdowns with pkd and lsd chewing through >150% CPU made sense. I did a search and FXFactory has crap installed all over (461 files total). Not knowing how much FXFactory stuff I've used in FCPX, I just removed the preference list (com.fxfactory.FxFactory.helper.plist) from the library, restarted, and after several hours have not seen a single beachball.

EVEN if the beachball comes back down the road, I think this is a big clue as to a source of the problem. After verifying that my FCPX projects are clear/ed of any FXFactory stuff, I'll be removing ALL FXFactory files on my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019, 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5, 40 GB 2400 MHz DDR4, Radeon Pro 570X 4 GB).

THANK YOU!
 
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Thank you for that update, I've gone ahead and uninstalled FX Factory from my system and emailed them a link to this thread. I'll report back if the issue remains on my end.
 
Same problem here with both pkd and lsd going up to 200% cpu randomly. MacBook Pro 15inch 2018 / Catalina 10.15.7 (havent installed the supplemental update yet).

Also, I dont have FXFactory, so there should be other/s apps that might cause it. Ideas are welcome ofc :)
 
Yeah I'm afraid I'm still seeing issues and occasionally have to kill pkd for them to resolve. Just now I couldn't send or receive messages with Messages but once I killed pkd, everything started syncing. This is the most bizarre thing lol
 
So here's something to add to my pkd woes - I've noticed when I go to right-click something (folder in Finder, a misspelled word in an email, etc) the system will beach ball and if I hop over to Activity Monitor, "pkd" is running 70% of one core. I kill it, the beach ball immediately goes away and I can continue with my business as usual.
 
Check Console for the errors pkd is spitting. First filter by "Errors and Faults". Then search for "pkd". Identify and delete the apps causing pkd to run around itself. Re-download culprit apps from reliable sources. Most likely, the culprits are apps that have had their code signatures tampered with, and pkd is making a fuss about it. It is also possible that the app developer(s) did not set the sandboxing entitlements for their .appex, the app extension files properly.
 
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For anyone finding this thread down the road, I wanted to report my solution to this. I tried removing plugins as above, and while that seemed to help for a bit, the pkd problem always returned. Eventually I stumbled upon a suggestion to reset Launch Services and the Spotlight index. I tried it, and have had no problems since then. For those unfamiliar, you can reset Launch Services with the following Terminal command:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain u -domain s -domain l -v

and you can reset the Spotlight index with the following Terminal command (admin password required):

sudo mdutil -E /
 
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c-had said:
For anyone finding this thread down the road, I wanted to report my solution to this. I tried removing plugins as above, and while that seemed to help for a bit, the pkd problem always returned. Eventually I stumbled upon a suggestion to reset Launch Services and the Spotlight index. I tried it, and have had no problems since then. For those unfamiliar, you can reset Launch Services with the following Terminal command:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain u -domain s -domain l -v

and you can reset the Spotlight index with the following Terminal command (admin password required):

sudo mdutil -E /
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Tried and unfortunately hasn't fixed it for me. I have Apptamer installed and limited LSD and PKD to 10% CPU. Any time the system starts to slow and I suspect they might be going rogue, I check Apptamer in the menubar. If it's the case, I run a Keyboard Maestro command that kills both of them, via an Alfred script. This works for me, although you could probably run the same script using other means. Both are attached.
 

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  • Macro and script.zip
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voltaicass said:
I actually just stubbornly installed Big Sur and it appears to have resolved this issue for me lol.
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I have installed Big Sur on a 2014 MBP that I have laying around and it is actually quite snappy. At least on the 'still freshly installed' phase. It did indeed fix it there.

I'm hesitant to install it on the main work computer just yet... would be bad if only one important thing doesn't work reliably there just yet.
 
To anyone who's interested, Jon at St Clair Software was incredibly helpful and actually wrote a build of App Tamer specifically to kill off pkd and lsd as soon as they flare up. I've had it installed for a few weeks now and it's completely solved the issue, which has plagued my 16" MBP for as long as I've had it. Try the demo and see how you get on.

https://www.stclairsoft.com/download/AppTamer-2.6.2d4.zip
 
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