For the last 6-8 months, I’ve been having an issue where “video streaming” spikes my CPU on my Mac.
This is a 2019 16″ MacBook Pro with 2.6GHz 6-core Intel, and 16GB Ram (I don’t remember what was optional at the time I bought it, but, all USB-C interfaces, and touchbar, if that matters).
If I’m “streaming” data and watching a video, the CPU spikes to somewhere between 500-900% CPU usage for the kernel_task as reported by Activity Monitor, and the laptop becomes essentially unusable.
I separate streaming from video, because, initially, I thought this was a Twitch problem. However, it seems to occur if there’s anything involving both video and heavy Internet downloads. So, for example, it can happen when I’m just watching Twitch. It would never happen if I were watching a video played in QuickTime Player or VLC. It would also never happen if I had, say, BitTorrent downloading content. But it does happen if I’m watching a video (on either QuickTime Player or VLC) and running BitTorrent.
It had gotten so annoying that I did something I would normally never do, and I upgraded to Ventura before the first patch release (MacOS 13.0; and have since updated to MacOS 13.0.1). But, if anything, those updates have made it worse. Now I can’t use Zoom, LunchClub, Google Meets, or really any streaming service. I need to tell everyone on the other end to turn off their video, in order for my computer to be usable.
Curiously, this only happens if the video is actually being displayed. For example, if I’m watching Twitch on an external monitor in full-screen mode, and swipe, so the video is on a “desktop” that is hidden, the CPU usage falls back to normal levels.
Any ideas on how to fix this, or at least diagnose further?
