I turned off all iCloud drive stuff and it seems something else is using it. I don't have photo sharing and photo syncing on between my Mac and iPhone. And I've turned off whatever I can. But still nsurlsessiond downloads over 400 MBs every time it runs; which sometimes is triggered with a restart of the system.
I did a sample process on it; but I have no idea what it means.
That daemon (or system process) is invoked and handles network download requests from many apps and many other services on macOS. (And iOS and tvOS and watchOS)
I haven't found an easy way to get summary details or statistics from the session manager, but since it works on a queue to upload or download things, my guess is you have one or more job(s) timing out.
Here are some ways to pick apart the activity on your system:
sudo lsof | grep nsurl
ps -ef|grep nsurl
sudo fs_usage -w | grep nsurl
The first lists open files and sorts for matches of “nsurl”. The second lists all processes and sorts again. The third lists file system activity.
That will let you monitor things and see which of the several nsurl daemons is running when you measure 400 mb of transfer. You can also get a dump of the system activity with sysdiagnose nsurlsessiond
If you determine that it's really iCloud Documents, you'll likely need brctl log -w to watch that subsystem instead of monitoring the worker threads that do the lifting.
ps one to start) and ask a new question. Before posting it, check the related questions and read through How to Ask and show where your research failed you in learning what the command does. Ping me here with a link and I'll see what I can do. Answering follow on questions in comments is hard and doesn't help the site
lsof, ps, fs_usage). How can I find the downloaded file?
In my case I have found that:
When backing up WhatsApp (on iOS - iPhone) chats to iCloud, it copies the backup into every machine that uses iCloud. The backup is placed into a hidden folder, on my machine (OS X 10.11.4) it is in the
/Users/UUUUUUU/Library/Mobile Documents/57T923XXXX~net~whatsapp~WhatsApp/Accounts/NNNNNNNNN/backup
folder, where UUUUUUU is my username and NNNNNNNNN is my phone number.
Unfortunately the backup file for the media is in one huge archive (mine is > 560MB) so every time WhatsApp backs up, the WHOLE file is re-downloaded, from what I can see. This is what nsurlsessiond is doing.
If you run the brctl log -w command mentioned above, you will see something along these lines:
received a push for container 57T923XXXX~net~whatsapp~WhatsApp
[note] 2.335 [2016-05-04 12:44:54.114] cloudkit.operation.callback sync-down.container-metadata BRCContainerMetadataSyncDownOperation.m:229
fetched 0 containers metadata from the cloud
[note] 2.375 [2016-05-04 12:44:54.154] sqlite.serverTruth zone.server BRCServerZone.m:771
received 25 edited items from the cloud for 57T923XXXX.net.whatsapp.WhatsApp
[note] 2.427 [2016-05-04 12:44:54.207] bird.scheduler.Apply Changes accountsession BRCAccountSession.m:1473
we will now download new documents automatically because the account contains less than 5 GB
[note] 2.536 [2016-05-04 12:44:54.316] sqlite.clientTruth fs.downloader BRCFSDownloader.m:1469
downloading 11 documents in 57T923XXXX.net.whatsapp.WhatsApp
Deleting the WhatsApp 'documents' (i.e. backups) via the iCloud storage management console in iOS or Mac OS X deletes the files from the Mobile Documents folder and thereafter there is no more activity from nsurlsessiond.
Hope this helps.
For Googlers that just want to stop the bandwidth usage, do what the OP did and turn off services that may be causing problems:
If you find something else hogging bandwidth on your machine then leave it in the comments and I'll add it here.
This was a really helpful post:
http://ayteck.blogspot.com/2015/09/limited-bandwidth-apple-and-hell-caused.html
For me, it was an "automatic update" from the App Store.
System Preferences > App Store / Software Update > Disable automatic updates saved me hundreds of megabytes per day in bandwidth. My machine becomes very slow when downloading updates.
In my case nsurlsessiond was using over 5MB/s of download bandwidth. I noticed this because web pages were loading very slowly, and thanks to the iStat Menus application in my Menu Bar.
I tried other methods to work out the source of the data usage, however I didn't find much useful information that wouldn't require further digging (and I didn't want to disable iCloud Backup or iCloud Photos).
The Activity Monitor application was able to provide me a quick overview of where the data was coming in and where it was going.
Open the Activity Monitor app and navigate to the Network tab, then sort by Rcvd Bytes and wait (the network tab only display cumulative results since you navigated to the tab). Here you will likely see nsurlsessiond topping the list.
Now navigate to the Disk tab in Activity Monitor and sort by Bytes Written. Ignoring kernel_task (which encapsulates a lot of functions and is rarely worth trying to debug), in my case Photos Agent was at the top of the list (which came as no surprise since I recorded a lot of video media on my iPhone the day before).
I deleted some recently captured media from my iPhone that I didn't need to keep, and waited a little while longer for the sync to complete, then the process settled down.
If you can't afford to wait for the process to settle down, and you don't need to use the Photos app, you can try stopping the process that triggers Photos Agent to sync photos from iCloud:
for i in com.apple.photolibraryd com.apple.photoanalysisd com.apple.cloudphotosd
do
launchctl stop $i
done
Apart from the iCloud settings in settings. In my case, it was the Message sync, in Message > Preferences > iMessage and there "activate Message for iCloud" that was the source of the problem.
Everything else had always been deactivated.
i just go to
System Preferences >> Apple ID >> iCloud
and uncheck all. problem solved. my case i think the iCloud Drive sync every bit of data to the server that's the problem i don't want to sync anything to iCloud so i just uncheck all
Taken from here:
If you want to stop it do
cd /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Profiles/Runtimes/iOS.simruntime/Contents/Resources/RuntimeRoot/System/Library/UserEventPlugins/com.apple.nsurlsessiond.plugin
mv com.apple.nsurlsessiond.plugin Rename-com.apple.nsurlsessiond.plugin
cd /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Profiles/Runtimes/iOS.simruntime/Contents/Resources/RuntimeRoot/usr/libexec
mv nsurlsessiond Rename-nsurlsessiond
THIS WORKS FOR ME :- (1) UPDATE THE SOFTWARE AND SAFARI (2) UNCHECK EXTENSIONS ON SAFARI's PREFERENCE EXTENSIONS SECTION (and simultaneously check the activity monitor)
any one of the extensions might cause nsurlsessiond problem .
The built-in nettop command displays additional information. This is what I see during an automatic app update of Xcode which has a size of 3.46 GB:
bytes_in bytes_out rx_dupe rx_ooo re-tx rtt_avg rcvsize tx_win
nsurlsessiond.507 2628 MiB 12 MiB 184 KiB 687 KiB 0 B
tcp4 192.168.0.3:61077<->uslax1-vip-bx-002.b.aaplimg.com:443 2628 MiB 12 MiB 184 KiB 687 KiB 0 B 58.25 ms 580 KiB 62 KiB
From here you can search the web for aaplimg.com and see that it's related to app store images (src).
