Apple - What is the 'deleted' daemon in macOS?

deleted is the process for CacheDelete, which is used to purge caches on disk. Looking in /System/Library/CacheDelete/ you can see what services are registered as a client.

I came here due to an issue on my MacBook Pro (2018 15") running on macOS Catalina 10.15.7.

In fact, the deleted process was showing up in my process list and consuming around 50% CPU - more or less. After following some hints which I found here and there (deinstalling iStats, resetting SMC and so on) I realized that this process kept on being open as long as my About this Mac window was open. The deleted process disappears shortly after closing the About this Mac window.

For me, this problem was being caused by problems with iStat Menus on macOS Sierra 10.12.0. There seems to be a bug which causes issues with the deleted process. Once I uninstalled iStat Menus the problem ceased.

This issue has been resolved, see https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus5/knownissues/