nsurlsessiond & akd trying to call home constantly!

[serr]

Googling this gets me a lot of talk about iCloud & App Store. I understand these utilities are used for those connections and services.
What else though? I have all that disabled (I think) and they still want to call home every 5 seconds. Little Snitch is getting a constant workout. The system is using over 2GB ram just at idle from these things trying to do their thing.

My aim is to simply be able to shut this stuff down when I wish. I’m not even paranoid about data sharing (I don’t trade with the Russian mob or organize protests). Just the ability to control the system if I might want to do something intentionally resource heavy myself.

 

[Yahooligan]

I'm not sure what makes you think these two system apps are using 2GB of memory combined or that they're somehow using excessive resources. You're overthinking things again, there's no need to drill-down and analyze every single process and packet that Apple runs/sends.

It's been about 4.5 days since my last reboot. Here's what akd and nsurlsessiond have consumed...

akd - 20MB of memory, 23 seconds of CPU time, 4.5MB of disk I/O, and zero network I/O.
nsurlsessiond - 27MB of memory, 23 seconds of CPU time, 46MB of disk I/O, and zero network I/O.

Sure seems like you're trying to find solutions for problems that don't exist.

 

[serr]

An app requesting a network connection every 5 seconds may be fine with you as long as it uses less than X bandwidth per (some time period). But I disagree.

I might be convinced to keep said apps on most of the time. But I sure want to know how to be able to turn off any service in my system! Again, not for any paranoia in any way. Just to know how to conserve resources if something critical comes up. (Some of us use these things as tools.)

OK, I get that your reply Yahooligan, was surely a long winded "I don't know!" as opposed to truly suggesting to someone to just play fast and loose and be unprofessional with the computer. Still...

How about anyone else?

 

[Yahooligan]

An app requesting a network connection every 5 seconds may be fine with you as long as it uses less than X bandwidth per (some time period). But I disagree.

I might be convinced to keep said apps on most of the time. But I sure want to know how to be able to turn off any service in my system! Again, not for any paranoia in any way. Just to know how to conserve resources if something critical comes up. (Some of us use these things as tools.)

OK, I get that your reply Yahooligan, was surely a long winded "I don't know!" as opposed to truly suggesting to someone to just play fast and loose and be unprofessional with the computer. Still...

How about anyone else?

If you're going to attempt to insult someone that is trying to explain to you that these core OS processes are not a concern then you're not going to have much luck getting help around here. Wanting to shut down lightweight processes in case you want to do something resource-intensive is essentially spending dollars to save pennies. If you've turned off/disabled/removed your iCloud account and/or the services associated with it (Not the processes, but the actual services like iCloud Drive, Photos, etc) then consider it done. Stop worrying about it.

I know exactly what these processes are for, my post has nothing to do with playing "fast and loose," being "unprofessional," not using my computers as tools, or "not knowing." However, it's clear that it doesn't matter what the processes do, you seem to want to kill or disable any process that you don't directly use (or know anything about). Unfortunately, that's not how operating systems work.

If you're really interested in learning, I'd suggest checking out Jonathan Levin's book series on macOS.

I also appreciate you wanting to learn and understand what goes on "under the hood," but sometimes you just need to accept things the way they are and not try and control every aspect of the OS. You are literally wasting more time and resources trying to micro-manage the OS than these processes consume.

Good luck in your endeavor, serr. I won't bother replying to your threads in the future.

 

[serr]

Crickets...

Apple support claimed to not know what these services are working with either! (I get being blown off in a chat session but unfortunately it looks either incompetent or dishonest.)

Between this and the buggy light tap drag-lock feature (which they at least admit to) this OS build is a bit of a regression at present.