How a deleted-in-the-end time-tracking app pinned a macOS daemon at 99% CPU for who knows how long — and how every "obvious" fix failed before a one-line log command cracked it open.
"My Mac is heating up. What's using all the RAM?"
That's how it began — a warm laptop, a whirring fan, and the completely reasonable assumption that memory was the villain. It's the question everyone asks, and it's almost always the wrong one.
Thirty seconds of ps and memory_pressure later, the RAM theory was dead: 65% free memory, zero swap used. Nothing was starving. But sorting processes by CPU instead of memory turned up something strange sitting quietly at the top:
99.7 36928 635 /usr/sbin/usernoted
