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Anyone actually familiar with tracking down launchd resource hogs?


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Anyone actually familiar with tracking down launchd resource hogs?
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2019-07-08, 18:59

So my hackintosh started acting up recently. The issue is that launchd will suddenly ramp up and eat one whole core and keep it pegged at 100%. When this happens almost everything hangs.

For those unfamiliar, this particular launchd is the initial process when a Mac starts. It spawns everything else.


I've searched the web and nothing really seems to fit with what I'm seeing. So anyone out there familiar with launchd resource hog tracking? Yes, I've looked through the console as admin (which has to be opened with command line when your user isn't an admin) and found nothing useful. Maybe I just don't know what I'm looking for. Anyone got any tips at all?

Mojave 10.14.5 and I can name off other versions if you think they might be important. I'll say the system isn't out of CPU or RAM when this happens. i7 7700, 32GB RAM, Some decent graphics card I mentioned in another thread that I've already forgotten and aren't going to look up right now.

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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2019-07-08, 20:36

I wonder if you have a badly defined service that's just making it lose its mind.

I would start by trolling through ~/Library/LaunchAgents/, ~/Library/LaunchDaemons/, /Library/LaunchAgents/, and /Library/LaunchDaemons/ and try to determine if anything looks out of place.

FWIW, `launchctl` is the CLI program you use to interact with `launchd`. If you're familiar with RHEL/CentOS and `systemctl`, you'll find it to have similarities because IIRC `launchd`/`launchctl` actually inspired the creation and definition of `systemd`/`systemctl` (but `systemd` continued to grow like a weed, much to some sysadmins' dismay…).

`launchctl help` will give you an overview of its subcommands, but `man launchctl` will probably be required reading to really understand the various arguments. `launchctl list` will list all known services, and that's another strategy to identify any possible rogue items. If you think a particular service is misbehaving, try to `launchctl print`, `launchctl blame`, `launchctl stop`, `launchctl unload`, and `launchctl remove` it (in that order).

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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2019-07-09, 03:23

Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle View Post
Yes, I've looked through the console as admin (which has to be opened with command line when your user isn't an admin) and found nothing useful. Maybe I just don't know what I'm looking for. Anyone got any tips at all?
You can play around with 'log stream' as an alternative, e.g. 'sudo log stream --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "launchd"' --info --debug'.

(If you don't set a predicate, that will be quite a firehose of information, but it might help you narrow it down.)

There's also a fair bit of info on logging here (section Logs — Sierra).
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2019-07-09, 15:47

I've been watching all day for my CPU to bog down and it won't. I ask you guys and then nothing.

I'm keeping a watch out for it though. The one thing I did do was fix an issues with my AirPort Extreme that was preventing Time Machine from working. It likely could have been the cause but I don't really know. I actually thought it was VMware Fusion and my primary VM I work out of but nothing today.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2019-07-09, 16:08

Schrödinger's bug.

By observing it, you may have changed its behavior.

You're welcome.
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