TravellingKiwi
Level 1 (4 points)
Mac OS X

Q: powerd causing slowdown & beachballs!

I found the 'cause' of my frequent slowdowns and beachballs on my MacPro 2013.

 

powerd

 

No idea what this thing is doing. But on the 28th the kernel logged that it was using excessive CPU...

 

bash-3.2# gzip -dc system.log.?.gz|grep powerd

Aug 28 11:32:15 thunderstruck kernel[0]: process powerd[84006] thread 17319657 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU (Actual recent usage: 50%) over 180 seconds. thread lifetime cpu usage 68758.830055 seconds, (68047.342467 user, 711.487588 system) ledger info: balance: 90008515843 credit: 68744236480789 debit: 68654227964946 limit: 90000000000 (50%) period: 180000000000 time since last refill (ns): 179878505851

Aug 28 11:32:16 thunderstruck spindump[940]: Saved cpu_resource.diag report for powerd version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/powerd_2016-08-28-113216_thunderstruck.cpu_reso urce.diag

bash-3.2#

 

My system was getting slower & slower. Today I got annoyed enough to live through the endless pauses from Activity Monitor and forced a kill of powerd daemon... Boy what a difference. It obviously causes other processes to sit & spin for some reason because as soon as I killed it, Activity Monitor went mental. It looks like AM queues up its timed update events. So immediately tried to catch up by running ALL the update events one after another... Like it was on speed.

 

powerd of course restarts automatically. but it would be nice to know what it thinks its doing when it goes mad. And has anyone else seen this? Nice to know I can stop rebooting my mac every week (Until I find the next issue). Is there an outstanding bug for Apple to fix this?

Mac Pro (Late 2013), OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), 32GB Memory, 6-core, Dual D500's

Posted on Sep 2, 2016 2:17 AM

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TravellingKiwi

Q: powerd causing slowdown & beachballs!

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  • by Barney-15E,

    Barney-15E Barney-15E Sep 3, 2016 6:20 PM in response to TravellingKiwi
    Level 8 (49,623 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 3, 2016 6:20 PM in response to TravellingKiwi

    From what I've seen on these forums, in most cases when background processes go "mad," it is some third-party process that is causing the problem. It just manifests itself with something that happens to affect. Figuring out the cause is often difficult.

     

    Nobody here would know if it is a bug that Apple is working on as none of us work for Apple, short of the moderators and community specialists who aren't directly connected to the software engineers.

  • by Eric Root,

    Eric Root Eric Root Sep 4, 2016 8:57 PM in response to TravellingKiwi
    Level 9 (69,536 points)
    iTunes
    Sep 4, 2016 8:57 PM in response to TravellingKiwi

    Try running this program and then copy and paste the output in a reply. The program was created by Etresoft, a frequent contributor.  Please use copy and paste as screen shots can be hard to read. On the screen with Options, please open Options and check the bottom 2 boxes before running. Click “Share Report” button in the toolbar, select “Copy to Clipboard” and then paste into a reply. This will show what is running on your computer. No personal information is shown.
      

    Etrecheck – System Information

  • by TravellingKiwi,

    TravellingKiwi TravellingKiwi Sep 6, 2016 1:05 AM in response to Eric Root
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 6, 2016 1:05 AM in response to Eric Root

    Yeah. Will do when it kicks in again. However I've run it previously when this happens and the only thing it shows is that powerd is using a lot of CPU. There's no obvious cause.

     

    As for 3rd party apps causing problems. About the only one I do run is Citrix Receiver. This is my main machine for wok, not a playpen like my laptop. I have added a couple of others recently (Karabiner to fix the keyboard home/end mapping, but the issue has been happening for a very long time.

     

    I do have a foscam plugin loaded on Safari...

     

    However blaming 3rd party apps seems disingenuous to me. The OS shouldn't be affected like this by 3rd party apps. That's the whole idea of a secure and robust OS...

  • by Barney-15E,

    Barney-15E Barney-15E Sep 6, 2016 4:22 AM in response to TravellingKiwi
    Level 8 (49,623 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 6, 2016 4:22 AM in response to TravellingKiwi

    However blaming 3rd party apps seems disingenuous to me. The OS shouldn't be affected like this by 3rd party apps. That's the whole idea of a secure and robust OS...

    When you give a program root access to hack the OS, what do you expect to happen?

  • by TravellingKiwi,

    TravellingKiwi TravellingKiwi Sep 6, 2016 6:58 AM in response to Barney-15E
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 6, 2016 6:58 AM in response to Barney-15E

    3rd party apps (Unless they're kernel extensions or daemons that absolutely require it) shouldn't be running as root...

  • by Barney-15E,

    Barney-15E Barney-15E Sep 6, 2016 2:52 PM in response to TravellingKiwi
    Level 8 (49,623 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 6, 2016 2:52 PM in response to TravellingKiwi

    I didn't say they were running as root. I said you gave the installer root privileges to muck with the OS in any way it wants--some of that mucking about is now restricted with SIP.