On checking my MBPr’s activity monitor, the keyboard maestro engine has an average energy impact of 1.82. This seems to me to be on the high side for a background app engine. How do I reduce this? Can it be this high due to the folder monitor actions?
The attached is how I am running. In very rare situations, my keyboard Maestro engine seems to run out of control, and I attributed this to some poorly implemented macros that I have since corrected. In general, I have no problem CPU loads for keyboard Maestro. I have 16GB of RAM.
Generally, the only time you get very high CPU/Energy usage out of Keyboard Maestro Engine is when it is searching the screen for an image (which is a highly computationally intensive task).
It will do this if you are executing a macro that requires this functionality (especially bad can be Pause Until since this will continuously check for the image). Check the Keyboard Maestro status Cancel submenu to see what macros are currently running, as well as the recently executed macros (select the All Macros group and sort the macros by macro execution).
If will also do this if there is an action editor displayed in the Keyboard Maestro editor which is live evaluating an expression involving searching the screen. Eg, an If Then Else action with a Screen Condition action. Since the displayed “(currently true)” or “(currently false)” condition is updated every second, even if the macro is not executing, if the condition is displayed in the Keyboard Maestro editor, it is still testing the screen.
Similarly, if Keyboard Maestro Engine is actively executing a macro (even if just waiting for the macro to complete), then you will get medium to high usage.
Cancel the appropriate macros, add timeouts if necessary so they dont recur, and don’t leave the Keyboard Maestro editor displaying such an action (quit it, or undisclose the actions, or deselect the macro).