High CPU Usage on macOS Catalina.... This is very annoying!

I recently encountered a high CPU usage problem and loud fans reported by others with the 'distnoted' process running high when I chose to sync existing OneDrive folders (around 85GB of new data to sync to my Mac from Onedrive).

For reference, I'm using a 2016 Macbook Pro i7 running MacOS Big Sur 11.1

Instead of disabling the Finder extension for Onedrive suggested by others, which removes the sync status icons next to each folder/file, I disabled the 'Allow Notifications' for OneDrive in the Notifications Centre and it appears I don't need to do anything further.

From my experience, my CPU load is much lower and fan noise has all but gone away, for me, this appears to have been enough.

It will still take time for files to the first sync but this is true in Windows also.

Since making this change I've not had further issues with the CPU load on OneDrive or 'distnoted' process (Notifications) but if I encounter other issues (or the CPU load goes back up) in the coming days/weeks I will edit this post with any additional actions/steps I take.

Thought I would share, hope someone finds this useful.

Thanks a lot! This response really helped fix my problem on Big Sur 11.1 that OneDrive and distnoted processes were eating up CPU constantly for no reason even when there was no activity in terms of file changes. Together, they were eating up as much as 290% of my CPU. After turning off Notifications as suggested above, I had to quit OneDrive and restart it, and also killed the distnoted process using Activity manager. After this change, things are a lot better. I see that the OneDrive process becomes active only when there is some change to some file in OneDrive. OneDrive still eats up 100-200% of the CPU when it kicks in, but thankfully that subsides as soon as the sync is done....and all is quiet until the next change. My iMac is overall very stable now whereas earlier it used to freeze up very frequently with the spinning beachball etc. Don't see any of that now! Thanks one again for the excellent suggestion.

I recently encountered a high CPU usage problem and loud fans reported by others with the 'distnoted' process running high when I chose to sync existing OneDrive folders (around 85GB of new data to sync to my Mac from Onedrive).

For reference, I'm using a 2016 Macbook Pro i7 running MacOS Big Sur 11.1

Instead of disabling the Finder extension for Onedrive suggested by others, which removes the sync status icons next to each folder/file, I disabled the 'Allow Notifications' for OneDrive in the Notifications Centre and it appears I don't need to do anything further.

From my experience, my CPU load is much lower and fan noise has all but gone away, for me, this appears to have been enough.

It will still take time for files to the first sync but this is true in Windows also.

Since making this change I've not had further issues with the CPU load on OneDrive or 'distnoted' process (Notifications) but if I encounter other issues (or the CPU load goes back up) in the coming days/weeks I will edit this post with any additional actions/steps I take.

Thought I would share, hope someone finds this useful.

Well, their online reviews reflect their efforts in fixing things so far. I wonder if this is something that we can bring to some major media outlets' attention and see how MS' big wigs respond! Wait, they're busy figuring out which other innovative company they can copy next.... 

That is exactly what mine is doing and I'm on the bleeding edge, Version 20.201.1005.0008. It has been doing this for over a year now--possibly longer.  I opened a ticket with Microsoft on the enterprise side but they stopped helping me because I refused to switch back to the non-insider preview version.  They assumed it was the preview version.

What is it processing and why? According to the app, the last file updated was 9 hours ago! Truly, where's the dev team? Probably working on another project that MS has to shut down innovative companies like Slack! ;)