Several months ago I started having issues with my Mac becoming almost unusable whenever djay Pro 2 is running. Basically what seems to happen is that whenever I open the app it starts a service called VTDecoderXPCService which then just sits at 300 % CPU usage until I terminate djay Pro. Sometimes I seemed to be able to stop it by disabling the microphone access or something like that in djay, but then sometimes it would come back again. Basically this issue (combined with the fact that djay Pro decided to bring its library to a corrupted state causing random crashes) made the whole app all but unusable, so I completely gave up DJing for almost half a year now. I did restore an earlier version of the library (from a Time Machine backup) that is slightly less corrupted but this wasn’t really a solution either.
Today I launched the app again, hoping for the best because some time ago I had seen something in the release notes that seemed to be related to my problems. It still crashes when I use it with the aforementioned library, and it still has the same missing metadata issue that started appearing just before the initial crash earlier this year. And it still has the CPU usage issue as well.
Anyway, I decided to take a closer look at the situation and found a few more things:
-
The VTDecoderXPCService process seems to be linked to one named com.apple.photos.VideoConversionService which uses another 30 % CPU or so.
-
com.apple.photos.VideoConversionService has a few open files in a folder named /private/var/folders/gn/…/T/com.apple.MediaLibraryService/. These files are obviously related to videos that I recorded on my iPhone and that are stored in Photos.app.
-
It seems that these services are gradually going through my entire Photos library (sometimes I can also see a JPEG file showing up there for a split second, before they continue working on the next video file). I assume that if I just let them work for a couple hours (or maybe days?) the CPU load will eventually go down and I’ll be able to use my computer (and djay Pro) again.
Now my biggest question is this: What the heck is djay Pro doing in my photos and videos? I never asked it to do anything there, and I sure as hell didn’t ask it to make my whole computer unresponsive (and itself unusable) for that reason. Seriously, Algoriddim?
