I have a Operator who sent me the following email …
I have a BesAgent.app question for you on Mac I had a user reach out to me and tell me that the BesAgent.app was using too much power. When we look at Activity Monitor, we can see that BesAgent uses the most energy of any app. The machine has version 10.0.7 installed on it, which most of our new builds have. I worked on a test M1 MacBook, which has the same version, and it was high on that one as well. The user said that he read that this issue can occur if BesAgent is not configured to respect battery energy usage. I have not been able to find anything about that. It is lower on my current production machine than on the test M1 (I set up a test machine with the same specs as the user). It’s still the highest in the 12-hour timeframe, but it’s like 2.3 instead of the 20 the user had. Do you know if the BesAgent can be configured in the way the user mentioned? Or if there’s anything I can do on the console for that machine, let me know. I attached the user’s activity monitor screenshot and my test M1 machine!
I pointed the Operator to the Client Settings page and suggested they look for Power settings there, but does anyone have any suggestions about how to better minimize the perceived consumption of resources on the MacBooks with M1 CPU’s?
It’s my thought that this is happening because the BESAgent is actually running and processing it’s work cycle loop ALL the time rather than a regular user app that just sits and does nothing for longer periods of time while the user stares at the screen.
That does seem like an issue / bug. Definitely make sure you are running the latest ARM agent on Apple Silicon Macs.
Assuming there isn’t a bug causing the agent to spike CPU all the time, then yes, this is part of if.
What I recommend is set the SleepIdle to the highest value and then set the desired WorkIdle to achieve the desired CPU usage value. This gives the CPU more time to deep sleep more often.
It might also be possible to have the BigFix agent have an affinity to running on efficiency cores, but that might be something that has to be handled on the platform code side of things.
The other option is to use PowerSaveEnable setting which will cause the client to use 0% CPU after nothing changes in the eval loop for a period of time, then wake up, do the eval loop, and if nothing changes, then go back to sleep. This is a great option for laptops on battery power to reduce the power usage. You should also use AccelerateForPendingMessage to cause the client to get out of PowerSave if a UDP message is received.
We had just moved from BigFix 10 to 11 about 3 weeks before the user reported the problem.
He had this problem for some time before that but hadn’t reported it to the admin.
We had not upgraded the client on his device at the time he reported the issue but during troubleshooting we performed a upgrade of the client via a fixlet to version 11.x. That did not resolve the issue. Manual uninstall of the client with a SUDO command and then manually installing the 11.x client worked.
