Weird CPU and GPU usage when display is turned off

[benmuetsch]

Hi everyone,

I upgraded my Mac Pro 2019 from Ventura to Sonoma this morning and now experience a strange issue where the computer uses significant amounts of GPU and CPU when doing nothing (no apps running) and the display is off! It starts when the OS is turning the display off automatically after 20 minutes of inactivity. All other energy saving options are turned off. This never happened on any macOS before.

Any ideas or recommendations?

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Ben

EDIT: I also turned all animated desktops and screensavers off, background is just one of the static pictures. Power Nap is also turned off. TBH nearly everything is off on this computer as it's only used for music production and web browsing.

 

[benmuetsch]

Update: also happens in Sequoia. Is this any kind of indexing?

 

[arw]

Too bad that to make the screenshots, you had to wake the display and the system went to almost 100% idle again so we can't see which process is responsible for the load.

At least UAD is definitely running. Perhaps an incompatible plugin or indexing...
Do you know how to disable its autostart / launch agent to rule it out as culprit?

You could keep the app "Activity Monitor" open and click the "Energy" tab. Then sort by the "Energy Impact" or "Avg Energy Impact"

Spoiler: de:

Programme > Dienstprogramme > Aktivitätsanzeige
Energiebedarf oder Ladung (12 Std.)

 

[Bigwaff]

Might help you discover the culprits

Ohanaware.com - Home of great Mac software

Ohanaware, Independant Mac Developers, since 2007. Home of Mac Apps such as Sleep Aid, Permissions Reset, Aqua Swatch, HDRtist and many others.

ohanaware.com

 

[benmuetsch]

Yeah, so it’s really weird, if only there were some way to remotely or retroactively find out which process is causing this.
I almost don’t believe it has anything to do with the UAD or Universal Audio thing, however, I could deactivate the Launch Daemon or background process and try running the computer without the UAD software to see if it happens again.

Now, last night, I left the computer on overnight and was watching something on the ARTE media library in the evening.
At 12:30 AM, the display went off. I can see this now in the 24-hour view of iStatMenus. And at 12:30 AM, it started doing something, both CPU and a fair amount of GPU activity again. The whole thing stopped at 4:30 AM, so four hours later, and then it went into idle with the display still off.
I woke it up just now at 8:00 AM, made myself a coffee, and had a quick breakfast. That means the screen went off again after 10mins of inactivity, and then it didn’t do anything more. So maybe I just need to monitor this for now.

Maybe it has something to do with the moving dynamic landscape backgrounds. Maybe it’s indexing something. It’s just strange that the GPU is involved. I’ve never seen anything like that before. I had Spotlight rebuild its index from scratch, and that goes pretty quickly too.

My biggest concern right now is that I just blindly upgraded to Sequoia macOS yesterday, and well, so far, everything seems to be working fine, but I do have some older audio plugins and software which are discontinued. But of course, with every upgrade, you’re always worried whether things will still work. In this sense, if anyone has any ideas on how to remotely or somehow track the history of which process is involved and doing something, I’d really appreciate it. I’d be very grateful.

Have a nice day, everyone.

 

[benmuetsch]

@Bigwaff wow that looks cool, might try this out!

 

[galad]

It's spotlight indexing all your photos and videos, frame by frame (probably not frame by frame, but many frames)

 

[aibloop]

What galad said, indexing 99,9% likely