The app pins my CPU and my Mac grinds to a halt (Intel Macs): the Performance settings that fix it

You open Booked Solid, the fan comes up, and the whole machine turns to treacle. In the words of the performer who first reported it: the app seems to be hogging the CPU even when not performing any tasks, and When I start the app, my computer grinds to a halt. A little later in the same thread: The tabs are also laggy now especially the more dropdown. If all you can say is that the app is slow and something is eating your processor, you are on the right page.

On Intel Macs this has a known cause and a known fix, and the fix is two switches rather than one. It is not Autopilot, and it is not a task running quietly in the background. Version 1.11.7 added both switches, and 1.11.8 taught the app to turn one of them on by itself.

What is actually going wrong

Booked Solid draws its screen using a separate graphics process, the same way a browser does. On some Intel Macs that graphics process crashes. The logs in the support bundles that cracked this case show it plainly: child process gone: type=GPU reason=abnormal-exit exitCode=8704 on 12 July, three times in a row on 18 July, again on 19 July, with a saved crash report and previous crashes detected on nearly every launch afterwards.

When that graphics process dies, the app does not stop. It falls back to redrawing everything the slow way, on the processor. That is the high CPU you are watching, and it happens whether or not you are doing anything. It also explains why the interface itself feels sticky rather than instant, which is exactly what the more dropdown lagging is telling you.

The same bundles ruled out the boring explanations, and it is worth knowing that so you do not go hunting: no email accounts connected, no calendars connected, and an empty list of scheduled tasks. The app genuinely was idle. Pausing Autopilot will not fix this because Autopilot was never the problem.

The machine this was traced on was an Intel Mac with 64 GB of RAM running macOS Tahoe 26.5.1, on Electron 42.6.1. Every report of this so far has opened with some version of the same line: I am on an intel mac. If you are on Apple Silicon, this graphics crash is not something we have seen on your hardware, so it is less likely to be your cause. The switches below are still yours to try, and if they do not settle it, the section at the end on what to send is the fastest way to an answer.

The thing almost everyone tries first, and why it is a dead end

Turning on the macOS setting at Apple menu > System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion does not fix this. Skip it as your fix.

To be fair to the idea: the app does honour reduce-motion, so it will calm the gentle looping glow animations, and you may see the machine get a little better. But it cannot stop a graphics process from crashing, and the crash is the part that is pinning your CPU. The performer who reported this tested it and came back with Reduce motion did not change anything. Two separate things were adding up, and the system-wide setting only ever touched one of them. It also slows down the animations everywhere else on your Mac, which is a real cost for half a fix.

The fix: update, then turn on both switches

Do these in order. The update has to come first, because the switches do not exist in older builds.

1. Update to 1.11.7 or newer. Click the Update ready badge in the top bar, or Check for updates, then Restart & install. If you would rather not wait for the check, reinstall over the top from booked.kivimedia.co/download. Your leads, history and setup stay exactly where they are.
2. Open the Settings tab in the right pane, stay on the General sub-tab, and scroll to the Performance section. It sits directly under the Generate Support Bundle button. Both switches in it are off by default.
3. Turn on Draw with the CPU (turn off graphics acceleration). This tells the app to skip the graphics chip from the very start, so there is no graphics process left to crash.
4. Fully quit Booked Solid with Cmd+Q and open it again. This switch only takes effect at launch. Closing the window is not enough, and the app will show you a reminder saying so.
5. Turn on Reduce animations. This stops the gentle looping glows on cards and tabs that keep the processor busy while nothing is happening. It takes effect right away, with no restart.

Turn on both. This is the one place people get half a result and conclude the fix does not work. Reduce animations on its own calms the idle drawing load but leaves the crash in place, so the grinding comes back. Draw with the CPU is the switch that addresses the crash. Together they remove both halves of the problem.

One thing you get back: Reduce animations is app-scoped. Once it is on inside Booked Solid, you can turn your Mac's system-wide Reduce Motion back off and let the rest of the computer animate normally again. You should not have to choose between a usable Mac and a calm app.

Which version you need

• 1.7.6 through 1.11.6: affected, and there is no switch to turn on. If you are here, updating is the whole first step.
• 1.11.7 (released 23 July 2026): adds the Performance section with Reduce animations and Draw with the CPU, both off by default.
• 1.11.8 (same day): adds the automatic fallback described below.

If you updated on 23 July and landed on 1.11.6, that is expected. The fix shipped about forty minutes after the report that prompted it, so an update pulled that morning predates it. Check for updates once more.

From 1.11.8 onward, the app can do this for you

You do not have to know the switch exists. From 1.11.8, the app watches its own graphics crashes. After two genuine crashes within fourteen days it turns Draw with the CPU on by itself and tells you so with a notification along the lines of Graphics keeps crashing, so Booked Solid switched itself to drawing with the CPU. Quit and reopen the app to finish the switch. It reminds you once more after the next launch, pointing you at Settings > Performance so you know where the switch lives and that you are in control of it.

Two details worth knowing:

• Only real crashes count. A clean shutdown, or a process you quit yourself, never counts toward it.
• If you deliberately turn the switch back off, the app respects that. The crash history is cleared when it flips, so it only steps in again if two new crashes actually happen. That history lives in its own small file, gpu-crash-guard.json, and never touches your settings or your work.

What to do while you are updating

Fully quit with Cmd+Q and reopen. That gives you a fresh graphics process and usually buys back a usable machine for a while. Pausing Autopilot will not change the CPU load here, but it does mean nothing new starts up while you are sorting this out.

If it still grinds after both switches

Then something other than the graphics crash is at work, and two pieces of evidence settle it quickly.

1. Turn on Support logging in Settings > General, reproduce the grind, then come back and click Generate Support Bundle. The full walkthrough is in Generate a support bundle and turn on support logging. The bundle carries app errors, version and system details, and redacted logs. It does not carry your messages, client details, passwords or saved keys.
2. While it is grinding, press Cmd+Space, type Activity Monitor, press Enter, and sort by CPU. There will be several lines named Booked Solid. Tell us which one is on top and roughly what percentage it shows. The name on the busiest line is usually the whole answer.

Send both to support.booked.kivimedia.co, or reply to bookedsolid@kivimedia.freshdesk.com, with your Mac model and chip and your macOS version. Include your app version too. That combination is normally enough to answer on the first reply.

If instead of slowness you are seeing a window that is blank or completely unresponsive, that is a different problem with its own recovery steps: see The app went blank or froze: how to recover without losing work.