OneDrive causes extended fileproviderd CPU activity, hurts battery life

🎉 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.

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!

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.

Hi everyone.

This solution helped me, altough I removed the files manually.

find . -type f -empty

Running fileproviderctl check -v after deleting the empty files found by the previous command, shows there are still some files with errors (some "is_filled_with_zeros", "is_evictable_without_flags|is_purgeable_not_evictable") but apparently that does not increase CPU activity.

I also ran fileproviderctl repair -v at the end, nothing changed much, though.

One thing I tried to do is search for the files that are shown by fileproviderctl check, based on the last character and the extension (like z.png, or *z.png), and I couldn't find any, neither locally or in the web portal. So either the entire route and filename are encrypted (and the last character on the name is part of the encrypted text), or maybe these are files already deleted and they're not actually on any of the folders.

Now, the final output I get with fileproviderctl check -v is

FPCK for XXXXXXXXXXXX:

❌ disk <-> FSSnapshot failed on 17/29804 files. 

✅ FSSnapshot <-> FPSnapshot succeeded on 29804 files. 

✅ ReconciliationTable checks succeeded on 29804 files.

None of this was any help at all for me. Reset OneDrive. Deleted empty files. Ran fileprovidercheck blah blah. It was good for one or two boots, and now it's back to burning CPU for 5 minutes at a time for no reason when I save a file, or even when I boot and log in. I think there must be some interaction between OneDrive and fileproviderd that is inefficiently written.

And why shouldn't I be able to have empty files, and directories with periods in the name? If I save a project with a nodejs installation in it, for examples, lots of developers leave around empty .gitkeep files to keep a directory structure they need. Maybe I created a notes.txt file and saved it without typing anything. So what. None of that should affect performance of cloud file sync.