Pages for Mac constantly causing high CPU usage

Hi, I’ve just updated by 2019 MacBook Pro to 18.5 and noticed “high” CPU % for Pages and tccd even when not working on the document, which I’ve never noticed before. I moved the document from iCloud to my local hard disk and now Pages is down to 0.3% when the document is open and not being edited, which is what it should be

Whether I launch Pages v14.4 on Sequoia v15.5 with a local 200 page document, or a one page document with text and equations from iCloud Drive, its CPU utilization with Pages at idle is less than 1%. This would naturally increase if I was actually working on a document performing a spell check, playijng an embedded video, or removing an image background. I don't see what you observe in Activity Monitor, and what you show is not what I consider high CPU utilization for a user application on a UNIX operating system.

Personally, I don't waste a minute looking at Activity Monitor. In most cases, including yours, there is nothing you can do other than close that Pages document(s), quit Pages, and potentially reboot. Pages is unlikely to be bug free, yet there is nothing in your post that suggests that this is a bug.

I have the same issue. Even when the document is not visible and App Nap should have kicked in, this don't happen and Pages and those other things still are sucking out my CPU.

I reported it to Apple, but like the hundreds of other bugs (that seems to propagate exponentially) I've reported to Apple but never have been fixed, I don't have much hope it helps this time.

If it drains the battery or let the fans rotate faster, it's a good choice to consult the Activity Monitor. For any software, that certainly is doing nothing, these values are far too high. And as I have the same issue, I can be sure that there is nothing Pages should do, while it do anything with the CPU. And the utilization is enough to decrease the battery, even when Pages should have throttled by App Nap, but App Nap doesn't get activated for Pages and those deamons.

Ordinarily, given a current operating system and Pages version for that operating system, I have never experienced any reason to open Activity Monitor. Pages certainly does not spin up the fans here.

I cannot state that this might not be the case if someone has created a multi-gigabyte Pages document full of images, something that most users do not pursue.

Running Pages in any beta version of macOS is uncharted territory and a version of Pages released for the current shipping operating system may go berserk in a beta version.

Whether intentionally, or inadvertently, users do install junk software on their Macs that can interfere with the operating system, individual applications, or even how the operating system services those application requests for resources. Resource contention will spin the fans up. The most egregious of junk software on a Mac would be any anti-virus software which has been known to compromise normal operating system functionality and that of applications too.

I searched a bit for it and found out, enough other people are having the same problems. High CPU usage for Pages and several iCloud-specific deamons.

I'm using the most recent non-beta versions of macOS on M1 Macs and rely on iCloud to let it sync my data between those. My Pages document is only about hundred pages of pure text without anything complex. And I'm a security and cleanse fanatic, so nothing on my Mac would disturb a normal functioning. And there's no additionally security software installed.

So the problems are 100% Apples cause. I even tested it further. After opening the Pages document everything is ok. Since I first change anything and even after I saved, the bug kicks in an keep staying while the document is opened. I looked in the Konsole.app and saw tccd is generating plenty of messages there. But what took my attention, is fileproviderd, which is creating errors over errors. So I guess there's a iCloud-sync bug, that causes an infinite loop of trying something with iCloud and never manage to correctly finish it.

But I can't tell, if the bug it's Pages-specific only. Because I even had data loss with other files synced over iCloud Drive. But only with Pages I noticed the additional high CPU utilization.

So it's Apples duty to fix that. I hope they will. Because over the last years I earn more and more negative experience with bugs in macOS and despite I reported all of them again with every major version, nearly none of them have been fixed till today. Apple seems not interested anymore in software quality 😢

I can't understand, why shareholders prefer an unstable system only to let the users get flooded with new half-baked features.

Wheren't macOS Snow Leopard celebrated by everyone for its focus not on features but on performance and stability? Why don't do such a year again of only making macOS "great again" 😅

Sorry for the wailing, but I finally needed to write that once, instead of being frustrated all alone with this…

The vast majority of my Pages documents are on my local drive and I infrequently access Pages documents on iCloud Drive, or my Synology Server. If there were a "bug" whether in macOS, or Pages, it would have shown up here across several operating system and Pages version upgrades. It has not.

When I see a comment like "And I'm a security and cleanse fanatic," it makes me wonder what third-party software you have installed to achieve those ends. All the security you need is already in the operating system implementation, and many so-called Mac cleaning applications can be downright damaging to valid applications and documents. Just wondering… since I don't install these category of applications.

There are downright bugs, and there are things that people do not understand, or believe they should work differently and declare this category as bugs. Once someone believes there is a bug, or someone has broke into their Mac, it is hard to convince them otherwise. There are countless posts in the communities that fall into this pit. Many like to reference them as proof, which they are not.

Reboot your Mac and see if your current Pages and iCloud issue with churning fans goes away. My Mac is shutdown overnight, and restarted every morning.

I liked Snow Leopard, but 13 years later, the operating system has grown too large to fully debug and probably it would take more than a year hiatus to fix all of them, putting Apple stock value and product sales in jeopardy. Not going to happen.