Extreme slowing down of MacBook Pro due to pkd process I am debugging this issue for several days now, but just realized that a certain pkd process is responsible for extremely slowing down my MacBook Pro. When I kill this process, everything works fine. While the process is running, I cannot work with the MacBook. I cannot startup Finder, I cannot typ anything, etc. I can barely manage to open the Activity Manager and kill siad pkd process.

Here is a picture of which files this process is using:



Does anyone know where this is coming from? Why does it block the laptop entirely? How can I solve this issue?

The laptop is a MacBook Pro Mid-2012 (serial number is C1MK9X6ZDTY3; it is a MacBook Pro 13-Inch "Core i5" 2.5 Mid-2012). The operating system was recently updated to Catalina 10.15.4. Thanks for your help.
According to the man page, pkd is a:

management and supervision daemon for plug-in services

You can stop it with:
launchctl stop com.apple.pluginkit.pkd

It will restart automatically when needed.