syslogd cpu usage bug in leopard

October 4th, 2008

My mac had been acting a little funky lately, so I popped open Activity Monitor to find that syslogd was taking up about 99.9% of my CPU. Not good. I had noticed Little Snitch warning me lately of some outgoing messages to Apple’s crash report server, but I hadn’t thought much of it. Silly me.

I think what was happening was that syslogd was trying to record something to my system’s asl database, and probably when I migrated to Leopard about a month ago, that file became corrupted. Thanks to this thread I seem to have fixed the problem. I’ll repeat the steps recommended in that thread.

  1. sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
  2. sudo mv /var/log/asl.db /var/log/asl.db.orig
  3. sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
  4. Restart (probably not necessary, but let’s do it just to be safe)

Now no more cpu-eating syslogd madness. Too bad I just bought more ram.

Posted by alex Filed in

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