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MacOS 10.10 on 4 GB memory bloat: which launch daemons/agents/services can I disable? And how to discover the names of the culprits?

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I recently did a Yosemite (10.10) clean install on my 4 GB 2010 MBP, but it now has so much memory bloat due to unnecessary launch daemons/agents /services that it causes frequent beachballing; excessive memory pressure. This is **not a duplicate**; I did research manpage/docs on launchctl, launchd, Yosemite/Sierra whatsnew guides, AskDifferent, SO, Apple.com, many Mac enthusiast blogs/forums and many other sites for over a month now; see comments below for examples of the many Google keywords searches I tried; also, the answer is very MacOS-version-specific. This is driving me nuts. **I'm looking for a minimal configuration: no crap like iCloud, iTunes etc.** Just the absolute minimum set needed to run the OS. Clearly stuff like 'CloudPhotosConfiguration' is unnecessary bloat. (For reasons we will not go into here it doesn't make much economical sense to upgrade 8 GB RAM + SSD). **Question: How do I find out which launch daemons/agents/services I can safely disable on my mid-2010 MBP with 4 GB running Yosemite 10.10?** Activity Monitor doesn't show any obvious whales, although system memory usage when running Safari > when running Chrome. Below is a dump of which launchctl items had Status -44 (killed due to inadequate memory). Based on reading blogs, some are notorious (e.g. com.apple.bird), some are believed to be unnecessary, some cannot safely be stopped: clear; launchctl list | awk '($2 == "-44") { print $3 }' | sed -e 's/com.apple.//g' | sort -f com.apple. accountsd, AirPlayUIAgent, bird, CalendarAgent, CallHistoryPluginHelper, CallHistorySyncHelper, cfprefsd.xpc.agent, cloudd, CloudPhotosConfiguration, cloudphotosd, coreservices.appleid.authentication, coreservices.uiagent, DataDetectorsDynamicData, icloud.fmfd, iconservices.iconservicesagent, imdpersistence.IMDPersistenceAgent, InputMethodKit.UserDictionary, internetaccounts, MailServiceAgent, Maps.mapspushd, nsurlsessiond, nsurlstoraged, pbs, photolibraryd, pluginkit.pkd, printtool.agent, recentsd, secd, secinitd, security.cloudkeychainproxy3, soagent, spindump_agent, tccd, telephonyutilities.callservicesd
Asked by smci (233 rep)
Aug 27, 2017, 02:00 AM
Last activity: Feb 12, 2019, 02:45 PM