Devonthink and the system process "usernoted"

DEVONthink
1

For quite some time, I have been experiencing issues with the system process usernoted consuming a significant amount of CPU and consequently slowing down everything. Since the latest updates, the problem has worsened. I am still using version 15.7 and I need a little more time before I can update to Tahoe. Usernoted now consistently consumes over 200% of CPU, and at the same time the Notification Center always freeze and the arrow cursor disappears. I have searched for solutions, but I have not been able to find anything that has worked. There are several suggestions for solutions involving terminal commands, but as I am not familiar with the terminal, I am hesitant to pursue this route as I do not know what I am doing.

I presented this problem in the Mac power user group together with an output from Terminal (see below) and got this answer:

“Pretty sure this has something to do with Do Not Disturb and DEVONthink. Something to do with it holding a notification that was sent from DEVONthink whilst the device was in Do Not Disturb mode and then delivering it at a later point when Do Not Disturb was no longer active. I would guess that is completely normal behaviour and exactly how it is supposed to work”

Could this be the case? Has anybody had this problem? Does anybody know how to deal with this?
Your help would be much appreciated!

Output from Terminal (log show --predicate ‘process == “usernoted”’ --info):

2025-09-28 20:48:14.364932+0200 0x947ccf Default Ox6fc7bff 2813 2 usernoted: (DoNotDisturb)
\[com.apple.donotdisturb:BehaviorResolution\] \[com.apple.usernotifications.pipeline:AFAA6CCF-
C2C9-46AD-9698-4437A4B215D0\] Resolved event, details=<DNDMutableClientEventDetails:
0xb5763b880; identifier: "; bundleldentifier: com.devon-technologies.think; platform: unknown; type: Default; urgency: Default; sender: (null); threadldentifier: 0; filter Critera: (null); notifyAnyway: 0; behavior: Default; forwardingBehavior: (null); title: (null); subtitle: (null); body: (null)> behavior= <DNDClientEventBehavior: Oxb59ce2f70; eventDetails: <DNDClientEventDetails: 0xb57639580; identifier: "; bundleldentifier: com.devon-technologies.think; platform: unknown; type: Default; urgency: Default; sender: (null); threadldentifier: 0; filterCritera: (null); notifyAnyway: 0; behavior:
Default; forwardingBehavior: (null); title: (null); subtitle: (null); body: (null)>; interruptionSuppression: delay delivery; intelligentBehavior: unused; resolutionReason: mode configuration type; activeModeUID: C8768975-1376-4E20-9995-3B02C332BDF0>
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Even after rebooting?

3

Yes, the problems start immediately after rebooting, which I have seen many times now.

4

Even before launching DEVONthink?

5

Devonthink is one of my primary applications, so it always starts with booting or rebooting. But I am investigating. I quit Devonthink, “do not disturb”, and stopped all notifications from all apps. The problem disappeared. I am now running Devonthink again, and the problem has not come back. So the problem seems to have something to do with “do not disturb” and / or Notification Center. But somehow Devonthink was involved. Any idea how? It would be good to know. But actually, it isn’t a big deal as I do not really depend on notifications and “do not disturb” on my Mac.

6

We do not recommend running a heavy application like DEVONthink when a machine boots. This would be especially true if you’re indexing files and even more true if they’re indexed from an external/networked volume.

7

Does any of your smart rules use the Display Notification action?

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I am not sure. I have a lot of smart rules. Is there any easy way to find these smart rules?

9

Not that I know of. I think you just have to check each one if you don’t remember.

10

I’m not sure.

I was curious, so I found your post on the MPU forum.

First: your screenshots from Activity Monitor don’t actually show the tab in the process window that jcoates asked about – “Open Files and Ports” (in german: “Geöffnete Dateien und Ports”).

Secondly: You said that you have trouble understanding the terminal output and only shared a small sample. I’m wondering how representative it is. Why did you choose that one? Did you see many entries containing ‌bundleIdentifier: com.devon-technologies.think?

In my case,

log show --predicate 'process == "usernoted"' --info

returns 220 log entries.
It also includes a summary at the end, which might be useful to look at?

Quoting from the MPU thread:

I can’t tell you whether this is causing your issue. But I would suggest to really interrogate the outputs to see if there is an application/service that consistently comes up and then look at the notification settings etc of that app/service specifically.

Sounds great! Yet I have no idea how to do that.

Applications and services all have an identifier that look like a reverse URL, i.e. ‌com.apple.donotdisturb or ‌com.devon-technologies.think.

It might be useful to filter the log text down to a list of just bundle identifiers. You can do that with grep:

log show --predicate 'process == "usernoted"' --info | grep --only-matching -E '(bundleIdentifier:(?:\s\S+)?)'

Then if anything sticks out, inspect it further in context.

1 Like
11

Thank you for your insightful response. Unfortunately, I have to hit the road and won’t have time to investigate this further right now. I’ll try to look into it when I get home.