To Kill a Mocking Daemon

I have a couple of old Macbook Pros, from 2012 and 2015. They work better than when I bought them, thanks to new batteries from Ifixit. However, there are some OS issues - processes that do not work well on older two core processors. The photoanalysisd daemon is one of the useless things that saps all available processing power and killing it doesn't work - something always starts it up again.

My simple solution is to delete a bad daemon. If it isn't there, then it cannot run.

However a recent security update, restored it. So after more than a decade of bliss, I had to delete it again, which is a little bit of an annoyance, due to the system integrity protection. You cannot simply sudo and rm it. You got to reboot a couple times.

Deactivate SIP:
Turn off the Macbook
Hold down Command-R and press power button
Wait to boot into Utilities
Click Utilities, Terminal
# csrutil disable
# reboot

Delete photoanalysisd:
# su
# mount -uw /
# rm /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist
# rm /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PhotoAnalysis.framework/Versions/A/Support/photoanalysisd

Activate SIP: 
Turn off the Macbook
Hold down Command-R and press power button
Wait...
Click Utilities, Terminal
# csrutil enable
# reboot

Note that newer OS versions have a different method to get into the Recovery mode.

Another old app that doesn't work anymore and just sits there consuming all spare CPU power, is the NewsToday2 app which lurks in the never used drop down widget on the right of the top menu bar. That one is easy to fix - just remove it by clicking Edit and clicking the little minus sign.

La voila!

Herman

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