Syslogd makes high CPU Load and standby mode doesn´t work.

I saw this somewhere, but I was having the same problem and the culprit seems to be the firewall. For some reason logging had been turned on and so syslogd was going mad trying to log everything.

Going into Security in System Preferences and turning off logging, then killing the syslogd process in Activity Monitor seems to have fixed things.

I see the same issue with my MacBook
So far I have (on the advice of Apple support)
Restarted in Safe Mode, then restarted twice into my own account
No change
Reset PRAM
No change
Reset PMU
No change
Then, reading through this thread I have
Shut off all Widgets, shut off Spaces, removed Epson Scanner Monitor and Google Desktop from login items
Restarting after having done all of these things still has not made a difference. syslogd right now shows 99%

Oh yes, and also disabled firewall logging

Checked Activity Monitor, the only PPC item running was Microsoft Office Daemon, so killed it. Restarted and reset PRAM, still no difference.

All processes running now are Intel
No widgets
No spaces

I suppose the next thing to try is the Archive & Install without preserving, as recommended by Apple Support

OK, so went in and used the Terminal command mentioned earlier

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist

Seems to have knocked the temperature down a bit (based on what I see from iStat Pro widget). Restarting the MacBook I note that the process returns, which I don't mind as I'm sure (?) that the log might prove helpful in some way for troubleshooting?

I've run the Terminal command again, will have the machine run for a couple of hours and see if it cools down.

No need to wait a couple of hours to report it appears. After only a few minutes of running the Terminal command fan speed has dropped from the 6200 rpm range to in the 2500 rpm range, temperatures, as reported in iStat Pro widget, have dropped from in the 180 Fahrenheit + range to in the 120 Fahrenheit range.

I am seeing the same problem, I can't get rid of it. Syslogd goes right to 100% CPU load right after startup, I even closed everything that loaded on startup. So even with a clean restart Systlogd kills my CPU cycle. I do have azureaus installed, but even without having it loaded my cycles are being killed. Any ideas?

This really *****, it is killing my battery life... apple please fix this now.

Well, after all the messing about I finally did the Archive & Install. syslogd is now down to between 0 and 2%. Spotlight, of course, is working away indexing like mad, but that won't last forever.

Hey all,

To reiterate what's been said before, but that I don't think has been registered by a lot of people, syslogd is only loggin messages that its told to by the system. In other words, if it's going out of control, it's not a problem with syslogd, but rather it's because some program on your system is telling it to log items constantly. That's why we're seeing issues being caused from so many diferent places (dashboard widgets, parallels, radio shark...) thus, there probably isn't a single fix for this - in each case you will have to track down the offending program on your particular system.

How do I do this?

Go into /Applications/Utilities and open Console.app. This program lets you read all of the log files on your computer. Browse through the logs until you find one that seems to be massive and has thousands of repeated messages in it. Those messages, whatever they are, will lead you to the offending application.

For example, if you're seeing messages about Dashboard or Dock, then you've probably got a bad widget. Try removing widgets one at a time until the problem is fixed. If you're seeing logs about some other item track down that application and kill it or uninstall it.

In essence what I'm saying is that the problem isn't definitively spaces, or dashboard, or parallels, but could be ANY application on your system that keeps having errors, and hence logging them. Each person will have to track down exactly which application on their system is the culprit.

For me it was the Callwave SMS widget (and callwave are aware that their widget causes the issue) but that's beside the point. The main point is, look in Console.app and you will be able to work out what program is causing it in your case.

This isn't a problem with Leopard, but rather a problem with 3rd party apps being incompatible with Leopard.

Hope this helps,

Greg

I'm not so sure that the problem ISN'T with Leopard itself though Greg - after having this problem myself today, I tried the suggestion made by kikuchiyo about turning off Firewall Logging in Security and that seemed to fix the problem for me right now. For clarity, it's a weird one to turn off, seems you have to click either "Block All...", or "Set Access..." radio button first, then click advanced, and turn it off there.

So there is a chance that the built-in firewall in Leopard has an issue. It may also be the case that some application is reporting too much information to the firewall I guess. Hopefully Apple is looking into it.

Travis

I'm sure thats good advice in general, but I can say that (at least in MY case) this issue is NOT because of 3rd party applications being incompatible with Leopard. My issue first arose on this system where I had done a clean install (FORMAT and install) of 10.5, iWork '08, and iLife '08. Then system updates until they were all installed. Within a day or so I was noticing the problem of VERY sluggish behavior of menus, slow to quit applications, and long (1 or 2 min) lockups of the system where the busy cursor was spinning... and after much investigation found that the syslogd was involved and a constant low memory situation was causing it. I never did find out where all the memory was going, but the Console application and system logs indicated that there were thousands of messages being generated by dashboard widgets and at the time I ONLY had Apple widgets running. The messages were all "out of memory - dashboard" warnings. In hours the system.log grew to over 200megs in size just from the dashboard memory errors. Either Dashboard was causing the out of memory situation, OR just reacting to a no memory situation caused by another problem. I tried many reboots and leaving it powered down for a while and it came back within an hour or so of starting up each time.

I will say that after the steps I took in my last post (disabling widgets, spaces and running Leopard Cache Cleaner) -- the problem has completely disappeared. And since then I've re-enabled Spaces, added in widgets and started running third party software (including menubar apps and widgets and other background processes) without the problem returning. I can't say what the issue was except that it so far is gone.

I do think that in my case it was a memory leak or issue causing the syslogd activity to spike. Whereas before (on this 1gig ram system), after an hour of general use my "free ram" was down to 40-50 megs and the system was slowing noticibly, now the "free ram" amount pretty much stays at 300-400 megs, even when running a dozen or so apps at once.

Message was edited by: bhagemann

Message was edited by: bhagemann

Greg - did what you said to do with console.app, nothing there that has been repeated thousands of times.

what i have found is that if dashboard is running and you quit syslogd it comes back using 0% cpu, if you show dashboard and disable/enable a widget syslogd shoots straight back up and will stay around 70-90% until its quit again, then goes back to 0-4% cpu. Does it with all widgets (inc. calculator!).

A problem to be fixed by apple i think

Hi all,

the problem has nothing to do with dashboard widget, PPC code, azuereus, etc.

It's defintivly the syslog daemon having a problem with some installations.
Even Apple applications writing to the log are causing the abnomal CPU load when writing with syslogd.

Every time an application writes to the system.log - the CPU goes up.
even if you don't notice it. You can open console and activity monitor to trace back that
it's not a problem of a special suspected application. Every application that writes to the log
will lead to the high CPU load if you are affected by this issue.

As mentioned above you have two options to get rid of it.

Yoy can either disable the syslogd in a terminal
(don't worry to much about disabling the syslog daemon - the only thing that will happen is that you just don't log while your system is running - so what - you probably anyway never looked at those logfiles before this issue)

or you can reeinstall leopard with the "install and archive" option
which in most cases fixes the issue.

Actually found that even when the application causing the writes to the system.log is terminated, syslogd continues to load the cpu. Interestingly after killing the syslogd and restarting the application syslogd doesn't reach those levels again. The second time the application that started the system logs didn't log a single time.

Message was edited by: Ugo Kanain

Try to disable Back to my Mac access in .Mac System prefs, could be a culprit. Looks like it worked in my case.