BytetallymacOS background processes that use the network
Open Activity Monitor on a quiet Mac and you will still find dozens of processes talking to the internet. Most of them are supposed to be there: macOS splits its work across many small background services, so "one app" you never opened can be four separate daemons. This index explains what each one is, why it uses the network, roughly how much it should be using, and whether you can safely turn it off. Names are listed exactly as they appear in Activity Monitor, because that is what you are looking at when you come here.
Read the group headings as advice, not instructions. "Optional" means the feature is not required for macOS to work — it does not mean you will not miss it. rapportd, for example, is what powers Handoff, Universal Clipboard and Sidecar; plenty of people use those every day. Find out what a process actually does before deciding it is expendable.
Where you turn something off matters. If macOS has a setting for the feature, use that setting — the work is then never queued, which is cleaner and more predictable than letting it start and blocking it at the network layer. Each page below names the System Settings location where one exists. Blocking with a tool like Bytetally is the fallback for the cases where Apple exposes no switch, or where you want the feature most of the time and only need to rein it in on a metered connection.
Optional — check what it does first
Don't block — throttle instead
Leave these alone
Too small to bother with
See exactly how much it used
Bytetally tracks every process on your Mac separately — upload and download, live and historical. All on-device.
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