OneDrive causes extended fileproviderd CPU activity, hurts battery life

Still getting the problem here in Dec 2023 - currently using the Sonoma 14.2 dev betas - though this problem has been long-running for a while

I nearly moved fully to google drive, but had pushback from the family group & just renewed for 15 months.... If I lose trust in onedrive I may just have to accept paying for google as well.

I frequently see high fileproviderd etc. Errors from 'fileproviderctl check -v' include types like:

2023-12-01 16:28:26.760 fileproviderctl[10540:2717802] 💣 FPCK failed completing: Error Domain=FPCKDomain Code=65 "(null)"

<FPFS>/O{15}l/P{6}s/F{6}k.FacebookBeta_8xx8rvfyw5nnt!App: ❌ Left : is_empty_dir_with_extension

<FPFS>/O{15}l/P{6}s/i{11}s/D{7}s.old/I{6}1.jpg: ❌ Left : is_dataless_in_FS_Snapshot_but_not_on_disk|is_evictable_on_disk_but_not_in_FS_Snapshot
<FPFS>/O{15}l/G{23}s/m{31}s.pdf: ❌ Left : has_busy_date
<FPFS>/O{15}l/b{5}s/c{3}e/c{3}e/U{3}s/C{3}e/N{52}1.regtrans-ms: ❌ Left : is_filled_with_zeros

A lot of these make no sense, though clearly relates to pictures, documents.

My last attempt was to completely uninstall onedrive, cleanup everything, and resync from scratch. That was only a few weeks ago, but the issues have returned

I presume the high CPU occurs when it runs a periodic consistency check? Or is it caused by the 'errors' and are these errors harmless, data corruption... who knows. I imagine they just affect local, but pushing corruption up to the cloud is a concern.

I had a lot of empty files(!) and "fileproviderctl check -v" returned a cryptic list of paths of the form "<FPFS>/O{12}C/p{2}s/N{19}r.pptx", making it very difficult to hunt them all down.

But since they're all empty files, then they're probably not very useful, so I ran

find . -type f -empty -exec rm -v {} ;

in my One Drive directory, which finds _all_ empty files and deltes them. It's a big hammer, but it works like a charm. No more CPU hogging by fileproviderd!

🎉 Best solution for now！🎉

According to https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/comments/u4bhy5/fileproviderd_causing_finder_to_crash_constantly/，

You may also run

fileproviderctl check -v

to see which files the process struggles with.

OR

Try:

fileproviderctl repair -v

It worked on some of my files but run it at your own risk.

In my case, I used ”fileproviderctl check -v“, then I found the files that caused the fileproviderd to run crazily.

• 2 files are 0kb in size(I moved them to another folder before, but they are still there, sync error)
• 2 folders are empty but with extension (It seems OneDrive doesn't work well with this).

🎉 When I deleted these files, fileproviderd calmed down.

No need to Reset OneDrive according to earlier comments.

It's the first line:

UPDATE possible solution: Try OneDrive's bundled reset script https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/reset-onedrive-34701e00-bf7b-42db-b960-84905399050c