Is Google Chrome updater killing Mac performance?

Google Chrome can just beat performance on your Mac. And I’m going to explain why, how and most importantly – what you can do about it. Because … this is a breaking controversy, with some people ready to throw Chrome into a blazing trash fire and others saying there’s no evidence, and even talking about it is reckless and embarrassing.

I think we talk honestly and in advance, and as reasonably as possible, how we get to the truth.

Keystoned

Loren Brichter on Twitter:

Now, if you don’t know Loren, he’s a legit 9000 IQ, maybe 11000 IQ genius type that helped build the graphics pipeline for the original iPhone – the one that gave Steve Jobs the rock-solid 60 frames per second he did a long time ago demanded in 2007. Then Loren created Tweetie (which was bought by Twitter and turned into the first official Twitter app), invented pull-to-refresh, and then created the game Letterpress.

It’s not like Google’s background updater, Keystone, is hiding itself from Activity Monitor; it is that it only shows when it is actively updating Chrome. But according to Loren’s theory, if that process goes wrong before Keystone shows up in Activity Monitor, it will go wrong, effectively hiding it even if it’s causing the problem.

Also that this is nothing new, which Wired Keystone called ‘evil’ back in 2009, when it started with Google Earth. That was more than 10 years ago. And other websites have since reported issues with it.

I don’t know if Google was doing anything nefarious with Keystone, or if a third party figured out how to do it (which Wired warned about). Regardless, I’m not inclined to give Google’s de-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people working on Chrome) since it was over a decade ago and this still hasn’t been “resolved” . There is no reason to automatically update software to do what Chrome / Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.

From Loren’s website, and this part really resonated with me, and I’ll tell you why:

I noticed my brand new 16-inch MacBook Pro starting to act sluggish, even with trivial things like scrolling. Activity Monitor showed nothing from Google using the CPU, but WindowServer took ~ 80% which is abnormally high (normally it should use <10%).

Doing all the normal things (quitting apps, logging out other users, restarting, zapping PRAM, etc) didn’t do anything, then I remembered installing Chrome a while ago to test a website.

I uninstalled Chrome and noticed Keystone while deleting some of Chrome’s other preferences and caches. I deleted everything from Google I could find, restarted the computer and it was just like night and day. Everything was instant and noticeably faster, and the WindowServer CPU was well below 10% again.

WindowServer pain

See, all year round I have been incredibly frustrated, even gone mad with similar issues and similarly had tried everything I could think of.

It was especially bad when I was up all night trying to finish my embargoed video reviews for the iPhones, Apple Watch, Macs, and everything else released this year. Literally, waking up all night, seeing Final Cut Pro performance drop, wasting hours, precious hours, rebooting, removing plugins, just anything imaginable. And I blamed macOS Catalina because Catalina seemed to be one of those painful transition updates that everyone blamed for everything. So I tweeted my complaints about whether PDK, the plugin manager daemon was causing it, whether WindowServer itself had become rogue or gone bad. I even took the rare step for me and bothered some friends at Big Fruit. And never received satisfactory answers or solutions.

Not until this.

Now I almost always use Safari because I get much better performance and battery life with Safari than with Chrome, I think mainly because of the way they use hardware and software system resources and handle tabs. I’ll be switching to other browsers in a minute.

But because Google, a primarily web-based advertising company, has very different priorities than Apple, a mostly native device company, and because Chrome brought Internet Explorer’s utter destruction to browser dominance, time-bound developers and short-sighted product managers have just started treating Chrome as the Internet, ironically enough the same way they treated Internet Explorer, so some websites and web apps, including Google’s, work better or all on their own in Chrome. And even though Google’s Blink and Chromium are branching out from Apple’s WebKit, the different directions they’ve taken since then mean that Safari often gets the short end of the very pointed support stick.

The Chrome team was kind enough to respond, even on Saturday night:

We are not aware of any outstanding issues that would cause high CPU usage of Keystone, but please file a bug at http://crbug.com with steps to reproduce it and we will try to fix it as soon as possible unload.

Keystone shows up in Activity Monitor when it is started to run its periodic checks and updates, but the problem seems to be that WindowServer appears without or before it, or maybe while trying to appear?

And since Keystone hasn’t come out yet, but WindowServer is hitting, it’s not at all clear that Keystone could be the cause. Like dark matter, you can only measure its effect on the rest of the system. And yes, sure, post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy understood, removing it seems to fix the problem.

Dark matter

Yes, just starting Activity Monitor causes WindowServer to spike because you can’t observe something without affecting it, but in this case you’re starting it because you’re already observing the performance issues, not just kidding it. And if removing Keystone seems to stop those performance issues, verify the existence of that dark matter. So no, no price to designate that part.

And of course there could be other explanations like turning off Keystone maybe also turning off something else that caused this, or some problem between macOS and Keystone, or whatever.

But just put on my consumer hat – I don’t care. That is not my problem. That’s for the 9000 IQs to find out. I am the parent here. I don’t want or need to know the details. I just need it so I can work without feeling the need to throw a thousands of dollar machine out the window.

There is also a line of thought here that Chrome shouldn’t be updated this way anyway. That, yes, Google wants to essentially make the Chrome update process invisible, but that many apps handle updates every day, from the Mac App Store to Spark to more traditional, transparent methods that leave no doubts about things like this. And that when a company, not just Google, but Zoom, even Apple, makes the box too opaque, bad things grow in it. Includes performance and security issues.

I imagine now that it gets a lot of attention, the consciousness will escalate. And it would be great if the macOS or Chrome team or whoever can figure this out because, anecdotally at least, people who are frustrated definitely think they’ve found the solution to those frustrations and Chrome will be removed at least temporarily , or at least cut Keystone to the knees.

Neither is obvious and the latter can be dangerous from a safety point of view.

What you can do

Loren suggests these steps, which I am following now and unless and until Chrome fixes the problem or it is reasonably proven not to be a Chrome problem:

1. Go to your / Applications folder and drag Chrome to the trash.
2. In the Finder, click the Go menu (at the top of the screen), then click “Go to Folder …”.
3. Type / Library and hit enter.
   • Check the following folders: LaunchAgents, Application Support, Caches, Preferences.
   • Delete all Google folders and everything else that starts with com.google … and com.google.keystone …
4. Go to “Go to folder …” again.
5. Type ~ / Library and hit enter. (Note the “~”)
   • Check the following folders: LaunchAgents, Application Support, Caches, Preferences.
   • Delete all Google folders and everything else that starts with com.google … and com.google.keystone …
6. Empty the recycle bin and restart your computer.

This is what I am doing now. As the issues are frustrating enough, I am willing to give it a try even though I depend on Chrome for some things as I depend on my Mac’s performance for everything.

There is also a MacObserver article from 5 years ago that explains how to use terminal commands to change the frequency for Keystone checks. That’s if you really can’t or don’t want to uninstall Chrome, but have to stop the system.

John Martellaro shows how to change it to run only every 48 hours … or never … but rightly points out that you will never run out of security updates, which … leaves you open to security issues. I leave a link in the description, but proceed with extreme caution.

And if you also can’t just stick with Safari because some damn website doesn’t support it properly, other Chromium-based browsers like Microsoft Edge probably don’t have the same problem because even though they use Google’s rendering engines, they use the Google’s software update engine. So they should be okay.

I personally give this a try. If you are too, let me know how it works for you.