Just wanted to say HUGE thanks to
@megaksa, as this configd issue has been annoying me for more than a year.
My story is the same as everyone else's here: old MBP with a replaced battery, configd at 100% CPU on certain websites, rendering whole Macbook unusable until I plug it in.
I figured it was related to the OEM battery I had installed last year (unstable voltage/wattage maybe?), but this week I replaced it with a new one, and exactly same symptoms with configd making my MBP crawl! It sent me googling again, which used to be unfruitful until enough people had the same problem and this topic had appeared. Long story short: it's the `firmware throttling` that's causing configd 100% cpu usage, and it can be disabled thru OCLP advanced settings. Very stupid of Apple if you ask me, as the throttling usually starts when battery is fairly discharged already, and "throttling" it by using 100% of CPU just makes sure it discharges even faster, rendering Macbook unusable in the meantime. WtF, Cuppertino?
A guaranteed reproduction of the problem:
- open any heavy website (not google but something like CNN or HP.com or Reddit)
- in your Chrome devtools (cmd+shift+I) enable Network Throttling, set it to 'OFFLINE'. It will effectively block network requests in the current tab, so you'd have to press Refresh button to reload website and let the throttling kick in.
- observe configd awakening and causing havoc.
If you check your MacOS console logs, you can see lots of messages from configd related to power and IOKit, it's a bit of mistery how it all related to battery and blocked network requests, but it is what it is. Very verbose and totally useless.
After disabling "Firmware throttle" in OCLP, I tried the network throttling steps above and no configd anymore! Finally I can work untethered from powerpoint, and I believe it will improve battery lifespan as well as it won't run 2-3 cycles per day anymore.
P.S. I also recommend free Stats app (
https://github.com/exelban/stats) to quickly observe your apps and kill CPU hogs. It's unbelievable how inefficient MacOS is at killing rouge apps, and the only indication for most users are the cooling fans running at 200% RPM and plastic melting under their macbooks, while in reality it's just Spotlight looping thru some cache or even time machine backup folder with million files in it or Reminders/Calendar app stuck in some limbo update cycle, using 150% of your cores. Used to happen all the time with previous MacOS versions, and Stats is amazing at catching such offending processes. Ventura is remarkably stable in this respect, almost as good as Mojave used to be (apart from configd issue which is finally fixed I hope).
