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I understand from my findings on the topic that sharedfilelistd is an "agent that is used by applications to read/modify recent documents/servers/hosts" and distnoted a "distributed notification services".

What I don't understand is why those two process very frequently start using between 130 and 200% of CPU (Monitor).

I tried various combinations of apps loaded or not that would be causing the problem, but I was unable to discern a pattern.

I can't tie this issue with any noticeable event (update, install, config tweak, ...).

Any idea ? (while I continue looking into possible causes)

Config: MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015) High Sierra 10.13.4 2,2 GHz Intel Core i7 8 Go 1600 MHz DDR3 Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 Mo

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    To rule out if these have legitimate work to do, what happens if you disconnect all network connections and restart the Mac. These daemons should process all remaining work and then be mostly idle 20 minutes after you log in.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented May 6, 2018 at 15:27
  • Did you ever figure this out?
    – Hakanai
    Commented Sep 14, 2018 at 5:44
  • I've just had this happen for the first time, and I'm in Singapore for the first time. Is this a coincidence?
    – Joanna Bryson
    Commented Nov 11, 2018 at 11:42

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
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I had the same problem with sharedfilelistd consistently taking over 100% of my CPU. I don't have file sharing enabled.

I opened up Terminal and found the processes with pgrep -lf sharedfilelistd, noticing two of them running; that might have indicated a problem. I killed both with sudo pkill sharedfilelistd and they terminated and one restarted, presumably via launchd.

After the single process returned, it took between 30-75% of my CPU, perhaps averaging 50%, and my machine is back to normal. There might be some impact to some service I'm not aware of or do not use, but this worked for me.

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Relaunching the Finder helped for me.

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    Yes, it did! Mojave 10.14.6. Now I only have to solve why kernel_task has written 3.5 TB to the system ssd.
    – Javier Ruiz
    Commented Dec 11, 2020 at 10:39
  • @JavierRuiz Did you find out? I’m having the exact same issue. The only thing I could find in the Console was that somehow “Amazon Music Helper” was being launched and crashing over and over again, and writing crash reports. Weird, and definitely a problem (I don’t use Amazon Music!) but these don’t account for the large amount of data being written to SSD.
    – Konrad Rudolph
    Commented Jan 14, 2021 at 17:12
  • @KonradRudolph Hmm...actually I installed Amazon Music some time ago... So far I haven't been able to track the cause of this huge writing to disk.
    – Javier Ruiz
    Commented Jan 24, 2021 at 21:44
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I've seen similar symptoms but my solution was different.

I had the high CPU usage on sharedfilelistd but my Trash was empty, so emptying it wasn't an option. Then I noticed that Preview was also using a lot of CPU and when I checked it had a couple of images open from a shared folder.

Quitting Preview from Activity Monitor then

So, I think the underlying issue is if an application has a shared file open it can lead to sharedfilelistd running hot. Stopping this application releases the lock (or whatever the root cause is). It doesn't seem to happen immediately, only if a file is open for a while.

Config: Mojave 10.14.6 (18G2022), MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7, AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2 GB/Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB.

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  • Thanks. I started quitting unused apps and it seemed like Finder was the offender in my case. Mid 2017 15" MacBook Pro/ Mojave 10.14.6 as well.
    – Michael Roswell
    Commented May 6, 2020 at 19:41
2

I also had this problem, which I solved when I emptied the Trash

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    Welcome to Ask Different and taking the time to post an answer! It's helpful to expand on your answer to further explain/clarify what you are attempting to communicate.
    – Allan
    Commented Nov 20, 2019 at 3:58
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    Answer seems complete to me. Succinct. Also appears to work.
    – ttt
    Commented Jan 13, 2020 at 6:16
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I don't know, I also encountered this problem, which made my CPU use up to 130%, but it seems to be temporary. There is also a distnoted process which also occupies a very high cpu

I shut down the file sharing and remote combo in the preferences and the two processes automatically exited

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    欢迎来到 Ask Different! 请注意这里是英语社区，所以请用英语发表内容。 / Welcome to Ask Different! Please note this is an English-only community, so please post in English.
    – iBug
    Commented Jun 14, 2018 at 5:36
  • I shut down the file sharing and remote combo in the preferences and the two processes automatically exited.
    – user1707683
    Commented Jun 14, 2018 at 5:37
  • I've turned off all sharing in system prefs and still very high cpu. Will restart and see what happens.
    – David Clarke
    Commented Jun 28, 2018 at 23:59
  • I see no effect turning off all sharing either.
    – Hakanai
    Commented Sep 14, 2018 at 5:43
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In Activity monitor, find the process with com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService (Finder) or com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService (Mail) as the name.

Kill the process in the parentheses: killall Mail or killall Finder

I don't know the reason, but it just works.

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