So I built this monster of a machine Hackintosh and everything is great, except after I go off and do something for 10-30 minutes, I’ll come back to the machine and everything is horribly non-responsive for about 20-40 seconds. I can move the mouse around, but windows are slow to open and things I click on take way to much time (for me) to respond. I have iStatMenus and can see that the CPU is up in percentage, and when I get the display to load (due to the sluggishness) I see “kernel_task” is taking over 100% of one of the CPUs.
I’m not an expert Hackintosh operator. I can assemble the machine and take the appropriate steps to install the macOS operating system. From there, I’m pretty much guessing. Enough Googling will usually solve any problems I’m having, but this one was a bit strange.
Finally, I decided I had to solve this. I did my searching and found a thread on tonymacx86.com that pointed to this thread which is 50+ pages long. I read every post.
The thread takes you through SSD brands, the Photo app issues, graphics cards, etc. There is methodical guessing going on throughout the thread, but ultimately …
The solution? Deleting com.apple.mediaanalysisd.plist.
When I read the initial thread, I didn’t find com.apple.mediaanalysisd.plist on my machine. That’s how I ended up reading through the 50+ thread. Since I couldn’t find the file, I assumed the problem lay elsewhere. I looked using the Finder GUI. The trick is to use Terminal.
sudo rm /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.mediaanalysisd.plist