How to stop mediaanalysisd? This mystery service has been terrorizing users for nearly a decade, wasting electricity and possibly SSD write life. Please keep your System Integrity Protection enabled on your macOS machines, because classic process control techniques exist to handle this situation thanks to UNIX principles. These instructions show how to setup a safe way to stop mediaanalysisd from wasting your system resources.
Open the Terminal app via Finder, and follow these instructions for each user on your system:
- Make sure the contents of the
stop-mediaanalysisd.shBASH script are in your home directory. - Make the script executable by running
chmod 755 ~/stop-mediaanalysisd.sh. - Run
crontab -eand add the following:
* * * * * ~/stop-mediaanalysisd.sh >> ~/stop-mediaanalysisd.log 2>&1
- Press the
ESCkey on your keyboard, carefully enter the string:wqand pressEnter(orReturn) on your keyboard. The Terminal window should restore back to showing the commands you ran previously, and you'll see a message saying the crontab was installed.
If you get stuck on Step 4, then please look up a YouTube video of how to use crontab -e.
A log file is created, called stop-mediaanalysisd.log. Ideally this file remains empty. If you find a problem, open an Issue in the GitHub repository here.
The crontab is a list of jobs that should run periodically, and five astericks means run the job every minute.
Every minute, the script will run, search for all process ID's that belong to mediaanalysisd, and STOP them. This is unlike killing them. Instead, the processes are paused. Running this script every minute finds the new process ID incase it has been restarted.
Additionally, the script re-prioritizes the paused process to have the lowest runtime priority (of 20, see man renice) for scheduling by the operating system.
This approach starves the process from doing whatever it is that it does. Perhaps some day when Apple is more transparent about what exactly mediaanalysisd is doing and offers a proper configuration interface, we can let it run.