I recently upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks and have found that the distnoted process will continue to grow (I've seen it use as much as 1.8G of RAM). Since I rarely reboot my MBP, this has become quite an issue for me. Anyone else seeing this issue?
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9)
I bought a new MBP with Mavericks, and distnoted is causing the fans to run at high speed, the distnoted process is taking 140% CPU and 1.4GB of virtual memory. It is getting to the point I can't switch between applications fluidly, and I have 16GB of RAM, and the fastest available processor! I am not happy and would love to find a solution.
I noticed the same problem since I upgraded to Mavericks. I have an iMac Core i7 with 16GB RAM and occassionaly distnoted can take 140% cpu. Needless to say the fans are running full steam. This never happened with Mountain Lion/Lion/ etc. I read the man pages on distnoted and though very brief it is related to distributed notification. I removed Quicksilver, Growl and it makes no difference. So is this related to Apple's own Notification system and if so what's going on in Mavericks to cause this. If the task is building a database or something, fine, it should finish off after some time but this does not seem to be happening.
Any ideas?
I'm starting to see a correlation between Mail going off in the weeds and distnoted growing. After opening up my MBP this morning and watching Mail write to my disk at 4MB/sec for 30 minutes like it does every time it wakes up, I see distnoted growing 0.1 MB in size every 30 seconds or so. I also notice that mtmd (Time Machine snapshot process) has popped up in CPU usage, which makes sense given the disk activity. I don't know if all of these processes are hooked together or not, but it looks suspicious. distnoted is now at 1.1GB in size and will start swapping soon, so I guess a reboot will be happening this morning. Seriously Apple, please test your next OS release a little more rigorously before dumping it on your faithful few.
Same for me. I never even knew of distnoted process, was never noticable before 10.9 upgrade. Since the 10.9 upgrade distnoted occasionally (about once an hour) spikes and takes 100% CPU for several minutes, and occupies 1.8Gb of Memory. Combined with the completely botched Exchange support in the Mail app, this makes 10.9 the most miserable OS update since a long time.
After digging around a little, I found I have 3 distnoted tasks running. These were owned by root (kernel_task), spotlight and one by launchd running under my user id. The one started by launchd under my user ID is seriously chewing cpu (>200% sometimes) and right now taking 262MB compared to 19.9 and 4.2 for the other distnoted processes. There were 8 or more threads running simultaneously.
I believe distnoted running under my user ID is used by at least the following apps - iTunes, Safari and who knows what else. I killed iTunes and found that cpu usage by distnoted fell a little. The thread did not terminate. I assume its because other apps were using it. I also quit Safari and distnoted remained in memory. When I started Safari again, cpu usage shot up to over 100% and then after some minutes it fell back to a more respectable few % and then idled after some time. On starting iTunes it took a few % cpu (nothing to be concerned about at that time). When a notification is displayed such as when I receive an email as expected cpu cycles are involved and usage is a few % (again all is expected). When using spotlight to search for a file cpu usage went up a few % (again OK). When swapping Spaces cpu % went up a little. So it looks like distnoted is used a lot.
The question is whether distnoted is efficient or not. I have not yet discovered what causes it to spike (>200%) for long periods of time.
I've also noticed that distnoted regularly consumes > 100% of CPU and that this causes my fan to run and the whole desktop to become unresponsive. I have Mavericks + top of the line MBP with 16 GB of RAM. I have little doubt that this is a Mavericks bug -- even if the actual trigger is in some other application that Apple doesn't control, Mavericks still shouldn't be responding in this way.
My latest attempt at a fix was simply to kill the distnoted process. We'll see how that goes, although for the moment the silence (no fan running) is a welcome relief!
One thing that makes distnoted cpu usage spike to >200% with hundreds of threads are some web pages. I don't know what's causing this - java? javascript? flash?
It usually takes some minutes for the threads to die and cpu usage falls down to normal (0-20%) when I switch away from these pages.
I haven't a clue what notification is being sent by Safari with these pages?
Well, I found one culprit that causes distnoted to balloon. I use emacs for development, and have found that if I restart emacs, distnoted shrinks to a reasonable size. So, something in emacs is causing distnoted to grow and not release memory.
A side note regarding emacs... if you use desktop to reload your buffers on startup, sometimes emacs will use up a lot of CPU while it tries to start. I don't know what it is doing, but if I kill the spinning process, remove the .emacs.desktop file and then start, it works. Kind of defeats the purpose of using desktop I guess, but it does work sometimes. This all started with Mavericks, so I guess there is something broken there.
You are right. So I swapped to Aquamacs and I have raely seen that problem since. I am not a super heavy user of emacs so Aquamacs is great for me with some familiar keystrokes etc.
A quick update here -- I was previously using Aquamacs 2.x, and had the problem all the time. Upgrading to Aquamacs 3.0a has completely eliminated the issue for me.
distnoted memory leak in Mavericks?
