"powerd" process uses a lot of CPU

Oftentimes, after I wake my Mac from sleep, powerd (which is the power management daemon? Which in particular deals with sleeping the Mac and waking it?) uses high CPU, usually around 25% to 50% on my i7 CPU.

Anyone know how I can find out what's causing it, and what I can do to fix it? It seems to be a problem with waking from sleep but I don't know what.

This problem started happening after I updated my Mac Mini to 10.10.2, a few weeks ago.

Solution 1:

sudo kill -HUP $(pgrep powerd)

(I don't have an answer for 'why')

Solution 2:

Have you tried to stop powerd by Activity Monitor? This solved the CPU consumption for me.

But after stopping powerd I got strange effect in Activity Monitor - it was like Update Frequency was changed from Often (2 sec) to Nonstop (0 sec), i.e. continuous without any delay. So I had to quit Activity Monitor too.

After these operations and restart of Activity Monitor all works fine.

Solution 3:

On my computer, it was Activity Monitor which caused the powerd process to use a lot of cpu (20-30%, sometimes 50%, resetting the SMC didn't help). Quitting Activity Monitor "solved" the problem. Checked in the Terminal by running top.

Solution 4:

I use iStatMenus to monitor a range of things and it confirms that powerd is only using a lot of CPU whilst Activity Monitor is running. At other times, it does not appear on the high CPU users list.