March 2026

Restart fseventsd on a mac

if fseventsd is taking 100% or more of a CPU you can restart it by quitting it in Activity Monitor (after which it restarts automatically).

  • Open Activity Monitor
  • fseventsd will probably be visible if it's having an issue. You can also search for it, if it's not for some reason.
  • Double click it.
  • Click Quit in the pop-up window.

It's usually not an issue, but when my machine has been up for a couple weeks and I've been using multiple file watchers a bunch it can freak out.

Quitting it and letting it restart itself clears things up.

-a

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