What iCloud for windows is doing in the background - it takes 25% cpu capacity by average | and how to solve it

I am using a surface book, and take the document fold synchronized with iCloud. So I have installed the iCloud for windows since I transferred from MacBook to surface pro/surface book (I have both).

The battery could last as long as the manual says, due to the high CPU occupation all the time by iCloud and it's photo library. By average, the 2 tasks take 25% of CPU capacity all the time but I never know what they are doing. I have done the synchronization of photo and document folders years ago, there is only a couple of dozens of small files/photos that need to be upload to iCloud by every day.

I can't kill the iCloud for Windows process because I need my files synchronized with my iPad, but that it quickly consuming my battery and making my computer super hot drive me crazy and have nothing to do with it.

iCloud showed in Task Manager

Anybody here could tell me what the iCloud is doing since my computer power is turned on? Why it occupies the CPU for years and does deliver anything? I also use Dropbox and one drive, none of them take so much resource to do the synchronization.

2 Answers

While we don't know what iCloud Photos are doing, we are not able to disable or pause the sync. And signing out of iCloud Windows is not a good idea as I think that will mess up the sync even further or, you need to restart the whole syncing and downloading all over again.

This is what I did, which seems to help somewhat:

1. in Windows Task Manager, right-click on iCloud Photos and click "Go to details"
2. this brings you to the Details tab in Task Manager
3. locate iCLoudPhotos.exe and right-click on it and choose Set Affinity
4. a pop-up appears for you to choose which CPU is allowed to run "iCloudPhotos.exe".
5. uncheck everything and just allow one CPU to run.

I find that that reduces the iCloud Photos CPU usage by half. It dropped from 29% to 14% for me. And when looking at the Performance tab in Task Manager, I can see only one CPU Core chart where the utilization is 100%, where as the other 7 Cores are normal.

It seems it's only iCloudPhotos that is the source of the CPU usage, once I pskill iCloudPhotos iCloudServices stopped using CPU.