What is distnoted on Mac?
By Junaid, maker of Taskglass · Last reviewed
Passes 'something changed' messages between apps and system services behind the scenes.
distnoted is the distributed notification server. Apps use it to broadcast short internal notices to each other, such as 'the appearance switched to Dark Mode', and distnoted delivers them to every app that's listening. These aren't the notification banners you see on screen. You'll usually see one system copy and one per logged-in user.
- Category
- macOS system
- Made by
- Apple
- Safe to quit:
- With care
Shown in Activity Monitor as distnoted
Why is distnoted using so much CPU or memory?
- An app broadcasting a flood of notices, often stuck in a loop
- Many apps launching or changing settings at once
- A buggy app, plug-in or menu bar utility
What to do
- 1Wait a minute; brief spikes are normal
- 2Quit recently installed or updated apps one at a time to see if it calms down
- 3Restart your Mac
Safe to quit? With care.
macOS relaunches it, but apps relying on it can misbehave until you restart, so there's no benefit in quitting it.
Typical usage
Rough ranges on Apple Silicon Macs. Yours will vary.
- CPU
- Near 0%
- Memory
- 5–30 MB
Related processes
Part of the Taskglass Process Library