Rjkjr

Q: Folder Action Dispatcher

Folder Actions Dispatcher sits in memory, and grows and grows until it consumes over 2 GB.  It will typically ask for as much as 50% of the CPU as well.  Then it usually crashes, but not before consuming the RAM that should be available for other applications.

 

I did some sleuthing, and found a com.apple.FolderActions.folders.plist file in the ~Library/Launch Agents folder.  Something is changing it very frequently.

Inside, the file contains the following script: 

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

  <key>Label</key>

  <string>com.apple.FolderActions.folders</string>

  <key>Program</key>

  <string>/usr/bin/osascript</string>

  <key>ProgramArguments</key>

  <array>

  <string>osascript</string>

  <string>-e</string>

  <string>tell application "Folder Actions Dispatcher" to tick</string>

  </array>

  <key>WatchPaths</key>

  <array>

  <string>/Applications</string>

  </array>

</dict>

</plist>

 

I conclude that some application somewhere is causing AppleScript to watch /Applications for changes, for some reason.  I don't know why this would cause Folder Actions Dispatcher to grow and grow as it does.

 

Questions:

  • is there a way to find the "author" or "owner" (a program) of the script and stop it?
  • I cannot delete the file -- are there innocuous changes to it that might cause it to stop behaving this way?


thank you

Mac Pro

Posted on Jul 26, 2014 9:01 AM

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Q: Folder Action Dispatcher

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  • by DragonDave,

    DragonDave DragonDave Nov 18, 2014 1:20 PM in response to Corey Edwards
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Nov 18, 2014 1:20 PM in response to Corey Edwards

    Good to hear!

     

    Unfortunately, this problem has not been fixed with the recent 10.10.1 update.

  • by BDizzie,

    BDizzie BDizzie Nov 29, 2014 2:35 PM in response to Frank Caggiano
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 29, 2014 2:35 PM in response to Frank Caggiano

    God bless you!

  • by Shiggity123,

    Shiggity123 Shiggity123 Dec 12, 2014 11:07 PM in response to Frank Caggiano
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 12, 2014 11:07 PM in response to Frank Caggiano

    Ah, god bless the Tim Cook era.  Not-ready-for-primetime-Yosemite was causing this to happen on my MacBook also, and this solved the problem for me also.

  • by Brendon2424,

    Brendon2424 Brendon2424 Dec 15, 2014 7:45 PM in response to DragonDave
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 15, 2014 7:45 PM in response to DragonDave

    While the issue has not been corrected, the fix does work. While most of the people commenting above found disabling Folder Actions to resolve their issue, I use Folder Actions and cannot have it disabled. Even after reading this post a week ago, I came away thinking there still wasn't a fix for me, since I couldn't simply disable Folder Actions. Yesterday, I tried right clicking a folder, choosing Folder Action Setup, and unchecking Enable Folder Actions. As expected, the timed out Folder Action Dispatcher disappeared from my Event Viewer and everything was back to normal, minus my functioning Folder Actions. Then, I went back and re-checked the Enable Folder Actions. Sadly, this locked my entire system up. I was very depressed, until I did a hard shutdown, and upon rebooting, Folder Actions had indeed reenabled, and everything has been running smoothly for over 24 hours. In short, the solution is to disable and then reenable Folder Actions. Hope this helps someone.

  • by Brendon2424,

    Brendon2424 Brendon2424 Dec 16, 2014 7:15 PM in response to Brendon2424
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 16, 2014 7:15 PM in response to Brendon2424

    Sadly today Folder Actions Dispatcher is not responding again in the Activity Monitor. 48 hours was the longest I've seen it run, but my above post was incorrect. Apple still needs to address this

  • by Koyji,

    Koyji Koyji Dec 22, 2014 2:56 AM in response to Rjkjr
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 22, 2014 2:56 AM in response to Rjkjr

    Why isn't Apple fixing this!? It doesn't seem to be a a problem on my 27" iMac, but a troubling issue on my 17" MacBook Pro. Big enough issue to to stop using the product. I've already recommended to a few people to NOT buy a Mac because of it.

  • by milleron,

    milleron milleron Dec 23, 2014 9:19 AM in response to Rjkjr
    Level 1 (18 points)
    Safari
    Dec 23, 2014 9:19 AM in response to Rjkjr

    I, also, saw the process grow to 20 GB on my 16 GB iMac running Yosemite.  Now, I admit that I had not noticed any particular sluggishness with my computer, but I WAS aware of a lot of disk thrashing.  I assumed that was Time Machine doing it's thing, but since disabling Folder Actions, I've come to believe that it was a ridiculous amount of swapping into and out of virtual memory.

     

    In my case it was a RoboForm script that had resulted in the enabling of Folder Actions.  The name of that script was removeRoboFormHandler.

     

    Does anyone know if this is likely to adversely affect the function of RoboForm?  I ask because I cannot discern any difference in RoboForm's performance, but I'd deduce that the script had to be there for some reason.

  • by Sillydg,

    Sillydg Sillydg Dec 27, 2014 10:32 AM in response to milleron
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 27, 2014 10:32 AM in response to milleron

    I also noticed that the script, remove RoboFormHandler was listed in Folder Actions Dispatcher, but there are 2 listings for this script. I'm also curious about what purpose the script serves and why there are 2 listings. I unchecked both, and my system CPU usage went way down.

  • by Zaimejs,

    Zaimejs Zaimejs Jan 5, 2015 4:41 PM in response to Sillydg
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 5, 2015 4:41 PM in response to Sillydg

    I had three scripts that were red and said something about "quarantine". I deleted them. I hope that solves my problem. I appreciate the thread, but I don't feel like I knew what I was doing exactly. Hopefully nothing to dangerous.

     

    Every day I try to use my machine and it is frozen because all the memory is being used by that stupid process.

  • by Skinny Moo,

    Skinny Moo Skinny Moo Jan 12, 2015 12:39 PM in response to Frank Caggiano
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 12, 2015 12:39 PM in response to Frank Caggiano

    That worked like a charm. Thank you for helping.

  • by kingliam,

    kingliam kingliam Jan 20, 2015 10:34 AM in response to Rjkjr
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 20, 2015 10:34 AM in response to Rjkjr

    Just chiming in to report the same issue. On my 2013 MBP running OS X 10.10.1, the folder actions dispatcher grew to nearly 60GB. Screen Shot 2015-01-13 at 6.14.47 PM.png

    Thanks for everyone's help in determining the culprit and how to resolve this until this bug is fixed.

  • by gino_gl,

    gino_gl gino_gl Jan 29, 2015 8:08 AM in response to kingliam
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 29, 2015 8:08 AM in response to kingliam

    Hi,

     

    i also had this problem. In my default settings for Folder Actions Dispatcher was my Mac HDD.

    After i removed it, CPU and Memory load was normal. Before CPU and Memory load was very high!

    folder_dispatcher.png

  • by schwerd,

    schwerd schwerd Jan 29, 2015 8:10 PM in response to Rjkjr
    Level 1 (60 points)
    Jan 29, 2015 8:10 PM in response to Rjkjr

    just updated to Yosemite.... have done on other machines without this problem... but now this is killing me.....  Folder Actions Dispatcher is hammering machine at 90+% CPU usage no matter what I do...

     

    the odd thing, after reading this thread.... I have NO folder actions set... it's not even turned on... and yet... it's completely taking over my machine... Activity Monitor shows it running 91 - 94 % of CPU... but it's turned OFF everywhere I've looked for it.

     

    HELP!!!!!!!  how do I kill this menace????????

     

    hasn't happened on either of my other two machines... both running Yosemite just fine.... have never ever seen this

  • by DragonDave,

    DragonDave DragonDave Jan 30, 2015 10:15 AM in response to schwerd
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Jan 30, 2015 10:15 AM in response to schwerd

    1) What version of Yosemite are you running?

     

    2) Can you verify how you're checking to see if any folder actions are set? (as far as I know, no one's seen this if they haven't had folder actions turned on, and referencing a specific folder(s)). Also, do you have other accounts on that machine that might have them turned on?

     

    3) As far I can tell, this problem has been fixed with Yosemite 10.10.2. I'll know more on Monday (after I let it run all weekend), but after letting it run a couple of hours I'm not seeing either the CPU or the RAM problem. When I was seeing the problem, it was quite apparent after watching things in the Activity Monitor over the course of a half-hour. I'm not seeing anything like that now.

     

    Thanks...

  • by xairbusdriver,

    xairbusdriver xairbusdriver Feb 4, 2015 1:01 PM in response to schwerd
    Level 2 (160 points)
    Feb 4, 2015 1:01 PM in response to schwerd

    First, here's a ink to a post on ways to handle this problem: ttp://www.macissues.com/2015/01/30/fix-folder-actions-dispatcher-using-high-cpu- in-yosemite/l

     

    My problem was that I had NO Folder Action Setup... in any contextual menu! That made it extremely hard to follow any of the threads about this problem, since the first step in most of them was "use the Folder Action Setup app to...".   I had looked at the Keyboard Pref Pane->Shortcuts list of possible items yesterday, unfortunately, my frustrations got the better of me. I finally found the item in the 'Files and Folders' group of the above Pref Panel. For reason I can't fathom, it was not checked. I have no idea if that's the default, but it seems unlikely.

     

    Of course, by the time I found the setting, I had already eliminated the 'Dispatch' crashing (at least for the last 5+ hours) by editing the ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.FolderActions.folders.plist There is a 'key' value there named "WatchPaths" with an array (list) of paths to watch. WOW! All I did was to comment out the last four (of the 14) items and re-save the file. There is one that looks at "Internet Plug-Ins" in my user Library, the other three look at the entire three "Library" directories (user, /System/Library, and /Library). I will slowly UN-comment those, one at a time, when I have the time.

     

    In addition, I completely removed all the Services items in ~/Library/Services/ since none of them were particularly useful or used by apps I use often.

     

    Of course, since I made two completely different changes, I'll not know which (or IF) made things improve.

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