I recently bought a new Mac Mini M4 as an upgrade from my Mac Mini M1. Like some users who have upgraded, I’m interested in the performance gains and I’m comparing both systems using Activity Monitor.
One thing I’ve noticed with the M4 is this mediaanalysisd process is running at some point overnight (I leave my Macs on all the time). It is taking up a ridiculous amount of CPU time compared to other processes. Here’s a screenshot after I rebooted showing the amount of CPU Time it is taking after 36 hours uptime.
Seems like this topic comes up with many people when searching Google or elsewhere, and there seems to be quite a bit of disagreement about what this process is really doing. Unfortunately, there really doesn’t seem to be any real answers to the problem. This problem also doesn’t seem to be related to any specific kind of Mac hardware or OS and I’ve found similar questions asked years ago. This problem doesn’t seem to be a "new" at all.
I do not see any such process running on my M1, but it is running the latest macOS Sonoma (14.x) and not on macOS Sequoia (15.x) (if that matters).
I setup the M4 as a new computer and manually transferred my data over from the M1. I don’t have any pictures, but I do have some video and a lot of music. I use my Macs mainly for development and web browsing.
I’m looking for a definitive answer to this problem because I don’t see it happening on my M1.
EDIT
I get that M1 and M4 are very different machines, but I’m not sure why I never noticed this on the M1 ever. Yah, I understand that there’s performance cores and efficiency cores and Activity Monitor doesn’t appear to distinguish between the two. Since I wrote this question my CPU time for mediaanalysisd has gone up 4 CPU hours. It doesn’t feel right to just go "oh well".
That metric feels especially excessive given the number of cores the M4 has right? Especially when I’m not doing anything "media" related with the machine? Also especially when I leave Firefox open or Goland or anything else that might be resource heavy and they’re far, far less CPU Time by comparison.
But, my question is asking "why is this process excessive" and not asking "is it ok to be excessive".
EDIT
Another side effect of this problem is mds_stores is writing hundreds of gigabytes to disk in an 8 hour period. This is almost 12x more than the 2nd largest process, which is kernel_task.
Again, this doesn’t feel right. I’m about ready to factory reset the mac mini and freshly install macOS.
