Hello,

I have also been experiencing this issue on my MBP. I use four monitors: the laptop panel, a monitor over HDMI, and two DVI monitors via DisplayLink. I noticed that CPU usage for this process increases noticeably when I have a video playing on one of the DisplayLink-connected monitors, but not when I have it playing on either of the others.

Thanks.

High CPU
 

Hi All - I am having the same high CPU issue using 13" 2018 MBP on Mojave 10.14.3 (18D109)

Anything that is somewhat dynamic seems to cause it, examples, Video, Uberconference. If I move the windows to the native Mac display, the issue goes away.

Anyone got any ideas?

Cheers
Rossi

Bumping this up. 2015 MacBook Air, D3100 dock, u3415w monitor (made by Dell), but the CPU usage is way up there. My computer’s getting alarmingly warm during anything graphics-heavy like video playback.

Plugging the monitor directly into the Mac via DisplayPort is substantially better, so there’s definitely a problem with the dock or the driver. Probably the driver, because I was using this dock with an XPS earlier this week with no issues.

Keeping the DisplayPort cable plugged in for now, but hopefully there’ll be a performance improvement in the future.

Same issue... DL v 5.2, DisplayLinkManager > 100% of CPU
 

This is now consistently an issue on my Macbook Air 2018 w/ 16GB RAM! Fan constantly running and performance significantly impacted. Is there a fix?

This is repeatable on my MacBook Pro 2012 using Mac Screen Sharing to VNC to another machine. If the other machine is doing frequent updates (eg like some redrawing of part of a webpage, a very common occurence), then the CPU will go insane on my Mac.

I have looked at Activity Monitor to see that, in this order, the following are consuming CPU:
a. WindowServer (insanely active)
b. DisplayLinkManager (insanely active)
c. Screen Sharing (insanely active)
d. kernel_task
e. DisplayLinkUserAgent (not very busy)

DisplayLinkManager and Screen Sharing are hogging about the same amount of CPU.

I tried running Quartz Debug to see when screen updates were occurring but this irritatingly doesn't work over DisplayLink, so I have no idea whether the Screen Sharing is refreshing its view far too often (I am using adaptive quality, not full), causing DisplayLinkManager to try and push these updates through to the WindowServer, causing a global system slow down.

I also tried running Instruments and looking at DisplayLinkManager. Nothing of note comes up in that other than some secondary thread is very very busy, but as it is not a debug build I cannot see what it is actually doing.

Your developers will be able to repeat this very easily by doing the above!!! It seems that the entire screen is being polled to be pushed out to the external DisplayLink hardware, without any form of acceleration.

Is there any fix for this? I have recently bought this DisplayLink device and am quite disappointed by the CPU hogging that is occurring.

Unfortunately their business model relies on people not knowing that the DisplayLink architecture has severe fundamental performance issues. I doubt they will fix this.

I generally fix this issue by the following.

1. Uninstall Display Link
2. Reset PRAM, SMC and then boot MAC into Safe Mode
3. Reinstall DisplayLink

That seems to fix it for myself just need to do that every 6 weeks or so.

Hope it helps.

I'm running DisplayLink version 5.2 under Mojave 10.14.6 on the 2017 13'' MacBook Pro and I'm experiencing the exact same issues under the same circumstances.

I have a 2017 4 USB-C port MAC and my work forces me to use a Dell 3100 dock. I get the same problems every single day. Thinking it was some hing else I had loaded I took the trouble on the weekend to do a complete backup and reinstall of Mojave. Nothing else installed except Mojave and Displaylink. Sure enough after about 10hrs I get 150% for DisplayLink and another 35% for window driver CPU utilisation. This happens on driver version 5.0, 5.1 and 5.1.1. I stay away fro driver 5.2 because when I use that and its not connected to a display link dock external thunderbolt monitors do not work.

So, I guess the answer is it is not just you on 14.6 that has this problem but there are a number of us that have noticed there PC go insane with displaylink drivers. I notice because I work in a quite environment and I hear the fans go off I can almost guarantee what is happening. I meant to actually save a log to send to support today when it occurred but unfortunately I also need to work. maybe tomorrow when it happens.

Short answer is not much you can do about it as it would appear its a displaylink problem and maybe only with 14.6. You can try swapping Users when it happens I found that this causes it to go away....or 2 reboots seems to fix it as well (often 1 reboot does nothing).

Best of luck don;t see this ever getting fixed....Catalina I think will be an experience an a half for Displaylink.

Definitely a DisplayLink issue. I have run my MAC for 2 days without the DisplayLink driver installed but using thunderbolt monitors without experiencing the issue. Within 10 minutes of attaching a DisplayLink dock the DisplayLink Manager goes to above 100% CPU and Windowserver >35%. Disconnecting the dock removes the DisplayLink Manager CPU use but Windowsserver remains at 35%. The only way to restore is to reboot multiple times, typically twice, for some reason once is not enough.

So reinstalling Mojave as a clean install and blowing away all my previous data has had no effect on the outcome.

No responses from DisplayLink I see....shame.