How to fix avconferenced high CPU usage on Mac

What avconferenced does on a Mac

When your Mac heats up during a video call, you usually blame the app you can see. Zoom or FaceTime often land first on the suspect list. Sometimes a browser tab causes it. Confusion sets in when Activity Monitor points somewhere else, with a process named avconferenced sitting at the top of the CPU column while the apps on screen look fine. People tend to notice it when the fans ramp up, the UI stutters, or the battery drops faster than normal.

macOS ships with avconferenced as a system daemon that runs parts of Apple’s audio-video conferencing pipeline. It communicates with the camera and microphone, helps negotiate FaceTime sessions, and supports continuity features such as using an iPhone as a webcam or running Sidecar. When macOS needs low-latency video and audio for calling or camera-driven features, avconferenced does a chunk of the background work.

You do not install avconferenced, and it does not behave like malware. macOS includes it, and it usually consumes very little, waking up only when the system needs it. When you see high, sustained CPU usage, a glitch usually sits nearby: a capture session that never ended, a third-party video app pushing the AV stack into a bad state, a continuity feature looping, or a permissions mismatch. The sections below focus on the common causes and the practical fixes that bring the process back to normal.

Why avconferenced can spike CPU and memory

When avconferenced misbehaves, the machine usually tells you through performance instead of clear alerts. Fans spin up. Simple tasks feel slow. Battery drain starts to look ridiculous while a meeting runs, or after it ends. Activity Monitor then shows avconferenced consuming a big slice of CPU time and more memory than you would expect from a background daemon.

Most of the time, avconferenced does not fail in isolation. Something around it pushes it into a loop or keeps a session alive.

• Stuck or looping camera sessions: Apps sometimes close a window while leaving a capture session running behind the scenes. avconferenced keeps processing video and audio for that leftover session, so CPU use stays high even when nothing obvious uses the camera.
• Continuity and Sidecar glitches: Continuity Camera, Sidecar, and wireless mirroring use the same low-latency pipeline that FaceTime uses. If the connection to an iPhone or iPad flaps or never shuts down cleanly, macOS may keep renegotiating streams, and avconferenced ends up doing that work repeatedly.
• Aggressive or poorly written video apps: Some third-party conferencing tools, virtual camera utilities, and overlay apps hit Apple’s AV frameworks with heavy effects, odd resolutions, or repeated camera reinitialization. That behavior can keep avconferenced busy long after a normal call would settle down.
• System effects and permission issues: System-level video effects, such as Portrait mode, and microphone processing raise baseline resource use. If permissions drift after a macOS update or an app update, the daemon can fall into a start-fail-retry cycle that wastes CPU.

avconferenced acts like a hub in the camera and conferencing layer. It follows what surrounding software asks it to do. When that software gets stuck or behaves badly, Activity Monitor often pins the blame on avconferenced because it sits in the middle.

Common avconferenced high CPU symptoms

You can usually confirm avconferenced as the cause without much guesswork. Performance drops during a call or right after, yet the visible apps look ordinary. Activity Monitor quietly shows a background process taking an outsized share of CPU.

You often see a pattern like this: avconferenced rises near the top of the CPU list and stays there, sometimes above 100% on multi-core Macs, and it can keep running hot even after you close the video app until something restarts the daemon. You may also notice camera and permission weirdness, where the green camera light stays on longer than expected or turns on when you did not mean to open anything.

Some apps complain about camera or microphone access while others still work, and macOS might ask you to approve access for software you already approved. If continuity features sit in the mix, Sidecar sessions can drop or reconnect, an iPhone webcam option can appear and vanish in menus, and device handoff can feel less reliable than usual.

Each symptom alone can look minor. Together they usually point to a camera or continuity pipeline that did not shut down cleanly. If that matches what you see, the troubleshooting steps below target the exact failure modes that tend to trigger avconferenced loops.

Quick checks before deeper troubleshooting

Start with the basics, because they often fix the runaway case in one move.

• Restart your Mac: This clears stuck camera sessions, lingering continuity links, and daemons caught in a bad state.
• Quit every camera-related app you can think of: The common examples are FaceTime, Photo Booth, conferencing apps, and any browser tabs running calls. When done, recheck Activity Monitor to see if avconferenced settles.
• Install macOS updates if available: Go to System Settings > General > Software Update. This is worthwhile because Apple ships AV framework refinements in minor releases.
• Temporarily disconnect devices: If you use nearby iPhones or iPads for Continuity Camera or Sidecar, disconnect them or move them away for a bit and watch whether avconferenced calms down, because that points straight at the continuity stack.

If CPU use stays high after those checks, move into the manual fixes.

Manual fixes for avconferenced high CPU on Mac

Work through the steps in order, and check Activity Monitor after each change. That approach helps you isolate the trigger on your machine instead of changing everything at once.

Step 1. Check avconferenced in Activity Monitor

1. Open Finder, click Go in the menu bar, then choose Utilities.
2. Launch Activity Monitor.
3. Click the CPU tab.
4. Type avconferenced into the search field at the top right.
5. Note the % CPU and Memory values, and watch whether they stay elevated when you do not run a video app.
6. If you see avconferenced stuck at high usage, click it, hit the X button in the toolbar, then choose Force Quit.

Recheck Activity Monitor after a minute. macOS restarts the daemon automatically the next time the system needs it.

Step 2. Quit and relaunch camera apps

1. Click the Apple menu and choose Force Quit.
2. Select video-heavy apps such as FaceTime, Zoom, Teams, Photo Booth, or your browser.
3. Click Force Quit.

4. Reopen one essential app, such as FaceTime.
5. Start a short test call.
6. Watch avconferenced in Activity Monitor during the test.
7. If the CPU climbs only when one specific app runs, update or reinstall that app and review its camera settings. In many cases, switching off virtual backgrounds or other video effects stabilizes the daemon.

Step 3. Identify the app currently using the camera

1. Click the Control Center icon in the menu bar.
2. Look for areas such as Video Effects or Mic Mode, which usually show the app currently using the camera or microphone.
3. If you see an app you did not expect, quit it normally.
4. If it will not quit, use Apple menu > Force Quit to close it.
5. Confirm in Activity Monitor whether avconferenced CPU usage drops once that app closes.
6. If the same app appears right before spikes, treat it as the likely trigger and update, reinstall, or adjust its camera settings.

Step 4. Disable Continuity Camera and Handoff as a test

1. Open System Settings from the Apple menu.
2. Go to General > AirDrop & Handoff.
3. Toggle Handoff to Off.

4. Toggle Continuity Camera to Off.
5. Restart your Mac.
6. Use your Mac for a while with these features disabled and watch avconferenced in Activity Monitor.
7. If the high CPU issue disappears, re-enable the toggles one at a time later to see which feature brings the issue back.

Step 5. Turn off Sidecar and other display extensions

1. Click the Control Center icon in the menu bar.
2. Choose Screen Mirroring.

3. If an iPad or other display appears as connected, click it.
4. Select Stop Mirroring or Disconnect.
5. If you prefer the settings route, open System Settings > Displays and disconnect Sidecar or any wireless displays there.
6. Run a typical video call and watch avconferenced in Activity Monitor.
7. If the daemon behaves normally with Sidecar and mirroring disabled, treat this as a key clue that the continuity and display stack plays a role.

Step 6. Reset camera and microphone permissions

1. Open System Settings and go to Privacy & Security.
2. Select Camera.
3. Turn access Off for conferencing apps and browser apps.

4. Wait a few seconds.
5. Turn access On again for the apps you trust.
6. Return to Privacy & Security and select Microphone.
7. Repeat the same off-then-on toggling for relevant apps.

8. Restart your Mac.
9. Make a short test call with your main video app and monitor avconferenced.

Step 7. Boot into Safe Mode to rule out third-party conflicts

On Apple silicon Macs:

1. Shut the Mac down completely.
2. Press and hold the power button until startup options appear.
3. Select your startup disk.
4. Hold Shift and click Continue in Safe Mode.

On Intel-based Macs:

1. Restart the Mac and immediately press and hold Shift.
2. Release Shift at the login window. You should see Safe Boot.

After booting in Safe Mode:

1. Log in and open Activity Monitor.
2. Start a short test call in FaceTime or another basic video app.
3. Monitor avconferenced CPU usage during and after the call.
4. If everything looks normal in Safe Mode but the issue returns after a regular restart, focus on third-party extensions, plugins, helpers, or background utilities tied to video, audio, system tweaks, or security tools that monitor webcam activity.

Step 8. Sign out of FaceTime and reset the session

1. Open FaceTime.
2. From the menu bar, choose FaceTime > Settings, or Preferences on older macOS versions.
3. On the General tab, click Sign Out next to your Apple ID.

4. Quit FaceTime completely.
5. Restart your Mac.
6. Launch FaceTime again and sign in with your Apple ID.
7. Make a test call and check whether avconferenced still climbs to abnormal levels.

Step 9. Use Console to catch repeating avconferenced errors (advanced)

1. Open Spotlight with Command-Space, type Console, then press Return.
2. Select your Mac in the Devices list.
3. Click Start Streaming to view logs in real time.
4. Type avconferenced into the search field.
5. Reproduce the issue by starting a call or the action that normally triggers high CPU usage.
6. Watch for entries that repeat frequently and mention the same third-party app, plugin, or framework alongside avconferenced.
7. Update, disable, or uninstall the recurring component you identify, then recheck avconferenced in Activity Monitor.

Step 10. Test with a fresh user account

1. Open System Settings and go to Users & Groups.
2. Click Add User.
3. Create a new Administrator account and set a password.
4. Log out of your current account and log into the new one.
5. Open FaceTime or a conferencing app.
6. Grant camera and microphone permissions when prompted.
7. Make a short test call.
8. Monitor avconferenced in Activity Monitor during and after the test.

If the process behaves normally in the new account, the issue likely lives in your original profile’s settings or caches in ~/Library, and you can either clean the old profile or migrate gradually while tracking stability.

Is avconferenced safe, or malware?

macOS includes avconferenced as a legitimate system component, and FaceTime and camera services rely on it along with several continuity features. You should not try to remove or disable it as a permanent fix, since doing so breaks normal video calling and camera-related functions.

Malware could imitate the name in theory, but the real daemon runs from protected system locations and appears as a normal system process in Activity Monitor. If you ever see a process named "avconferenced" running from Downloads, Desktop, or an unfamiliar app bundle, treat that as suspicious.

In the real world, high CPU usage from avconferenced usually traces back to misbehaving apps, continuity issues, or permissions problems, not direct malicious activity. Aim to restore normal behavior instead of trying to delete the daemon.

How to reduce the chance of repeats

Once you stabilize avconferenced, a few habits lower the odds of seeing the same runaway pattern again.

• Install macOS updates promptly so you pick up fixes and optimizations in the audio-video stack. Review camera permissions in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Camera and remove access from apps you no longer use, since fewer camera-enabled apps means fewer potential conflicts.
• Avoid running multiple video apps at the same time, because sharing the camera and microphone across several apps raises the chance that one leaves a session in a weird state.
• Treat virtual camera and overlay utilities carefully, since tools that inject virtual cameras or apply aggressive tweaks often collide with macOS services, so install them one at a time and keep an eye on Activity Monitor after changes.

Watch the green camera indicator as a quick sanity check, and when it turns on unexpectedly, use the menu bar indicator to identify the app, then close it if it does not belong.

FAQ

1. Why does avconferenced run when I am not on a call?

2. Can I force quit avconferenced in Activity Monitor?

3. Can I disable avconferenced permanently to save resources?

4. Does high CPU from avconferenced mean someone spies through my camera?

5. Will reinstalling macOS fix avconferenced problems?