Make sure you delete everything having to do with FXFactory. All directories, all .fxplug files, everything. Checkah man.. still there. :-(
never considered wise to post identifying numbers on forums.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!
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.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?
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.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 /
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 actually just stubbornly installed Big Sur and it appears to have resolved this issue for me lol.