Help Menu Search Suddenly INSANELY LAGGY

[dysamoria]

Does anyone know why my Mac OS Help menu would suddenly be insanely laggy? I thought it had frozen, but it just takes like ten seconds for each letter typed to appear in the search box, and if I've typed a full word, sitting there waiting for it to respond is PAINFUL. WTF is going on??

EDIT: Opening the Help system itself is entirely broken, too. WTF? I can't find anything via search engines about this topic, and there's scant reference to Mac OS Help at all. Everything is "Spotlight index" or "system recovery" that has nothing to do with the Mac OS Help system. I'm assuming I need to delete a Help index, but I don't know where to start, so I guess I have to go searching around the Library folder and find an index to delete (or temporarily move to test a deletion).

 

[dysamoria]

So I'm guessing either nobody read this inquiry or nobody else has ever experienced this. Sigh. It's like Windows all over again.

 

[dysamoria]

For anyone else who experiences this in the future:

This site gave me useful info: http://thexlab.com/faqs/helpviewer.html

I deleted the Help preference files and Help cache folders, terminated the help daemon (helpd). It restarted, and I saw considerable CPU on what I assume is the Help Index Daemon (hidd). Help functions correctly again.

sysmond went nuts after that, but 🤷🏽‍♂️

EDIT: I forgot: sysmond is what supplies info to Activity Monitor. I had the update frequency set high. Closing Activity Monitor removes this CPU burden.