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I have a mid-2009 13" core 2 Duo MacBook Pro running High Sierra w/ upgraded 8 Gb RAM.

On Activity Monitor I usually get 20-40% 'idle CPU' with only Finder, Safari (3 tabs) and Activity Monitor opened. There's also nothing plugged in. 'User CPU' load varies quite a lot, but never above 'System CPU' which is always around 50%. So I wonder if those are normal CPU loads for my mac.

high CPU load

My mac always feels kind of hot despite having just these 3 apps opened and using it on a flat, wooden surface, slightly below room temperature with no direct sunlight. I read that it could be an issue with the cooling system, but the fan seems to work fine and I already took some dust off inside my mac (without detaching/disassembling anything except the metal case; maybe I should clean some parts separately?). Apple Hardware Test also gave me nothing on a simple test. Thank you to anyone who might respond.

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    Why are you running lsof? Does the system load go down if you stop that?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Jun 12, 2022 at 19:55
  • Can I safely stop it? It's nearly always running when I open Activity Monitor, by far the most CPU consuming process. Since it's labeled as 'root', I didn't want to mess with it. But I don't really know what's for or why it's always running (it briefly disappears a couple of secs and then comes back).
    – IanMac
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 2:56
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    lsof should not normally be running all the time (it lists open files). You need to find out why it is running. Activity Monitor can tell you its parent process.
    – Gilby
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 10:03
  • Oh, then that must be it. Parent process simply says 'core (69)', which then names 'launchd (1)' as its sur-parent, which finally gives me 'kernel_task (0)' as the ultimate parent. Is it perhaps some kind of malware calling lsof ?
    – IanMac
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 18:05

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I figured it out! It was an online-banking related software (called Warsaw) I needed to download in order to access my account from my mac, many many years ago. Practically malware. My computer has been dragging for God-knows-how-long because of it.

CPU process' name seems to vary depending on the machine.

On Finder, I went to my main HDD Volume > Library > LaunchAgents. Deleted com.diebold.warsaw.user.plist and all related diebold/Warsaw junk.

On Terminal, I entered:

sudo launchctl unload -F /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.diebold.warsaw.plist

and then, to uninstall the program:

sudo /usr/local/bin/warsaw/uninstall.sh

Then I rebooted my mac. My old mac is running fine again! Thanks @nohillside and @Gilby for the help!

credit: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253061816?answerId=255751446022

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