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

ARGGGGGGGG

My &^%*& machine started doing this &^% out of the blue today, no mayor changes or anything, encoding a movie this morning came back at noon to find my machine just freaking out, I couldn't even use the keyboard or mouse, this just happened, just like that.

Something screwed up my machine, I have been a systems engineer for over 15 years and this is baffling me, I did run a security update a couple of days ago. DAM IT DAM IT DAM IT.

It ****** me off when stuff like this happens and quite frankly apple has been dropping the ball in the QA dept a lot........Macbooks, Macbook Pros, ATV, Airport Base.

I have been an apple user for quite a while and about a year ago I started having issues I never thought I would with defective products.

Sorry but I do have to vent, you are growing faster than ever (exponentially) and you stopped paying attention to quality.

There I said it.

Interesting article:

http://smartic.us/2007/11/8/leopard-100-cpu-usage-caused-by-syslogd-and-possibly -time-machine

I went ahead and did the following:

After looking around and trying to find solutions I came across this article and started poking around, went into console (Utilities Folder); control click system log; that brings you into the proper folder; delete the asl.db database (Mine was 76MB); it will recreate itself

1. I copied the asl.db file to my home directory
2. Stopped syslogd
3. Deleted asl.db from the logs dir.

The system recreated the file just fine and now sits at 4k

The problem magically went away, it appears that the system can not deal with this file been large, my machine is now blazing fast the way it was when I bought it, now I have no clue what caused this file to grow but at least I know what to do next time, so far I fixed my Macbook and my iMac24.

Hope this helps someone.

Deleting asl.db works but only temporarily for me. Better than nothing I guess. Thanks!

Widget thing worked great. For me it was the Amazon artwork widget that kept getting out of line. I could just kill syslogd every 5 minutes too... that worked but got old really fast.

I've just found that it was a quicklook plug in that was causing my problem. I think basically any application that has a problem causes this issue. My syslogd was writing to the system log file so much that I couldn't open the console to see what the problem was. It was only when I opened the console and then force quited the syslogd process did it finish loading properly and I was able to see what was causing it.

Good luck

great guys, same problem than yours mounths ago after your first post. And guess what, my installation is a proper installation of leopard that was working for mounths now and suddenly syslogd going bad...
so I guess that Apple didn't touch the problem in his 5.3 update.
Are we sure that it's not a virus a script of a bad person?

Same problem on my 2 week old macbook with Leopard 10.5.3.I try close file in Activity monitor but there no file like this.I Turned off t.machine,then write to terminals same hint like other. Restart MB after ok "hopefully":))

Thought I'd resolved the issue by reinstalling Intego virusbarrier but to no avail. Still have about 50% CPU load at all times (minimum). Noticed that the dual cores work in opposites -- when one core is near 100%, the other is near 0%, therefore the balance near 50% showing.

It was low for a few minutes, but went back up to high levels again. Is this dues to any updates that Apple did? Something is writing to SYSLOGD but I'm not sure which program. Seems there are a variety of culprits from what I read here.

I hadn't even seen this thread before searching Google for some help as to why my Syslogd suddenly started running at 100%, with fans almost making my Macbook take off. What I did was quit all open applications (didn't work) thinking that perhaps something had gone south in one of them; I then disabled Spaces, Dashboard and Time Machine and it didn't help. I opened Activity Monitor, caught the process running at 100% and had to force quit it.

Syslogd since then runs fine (for now). It is strange though- and slightly worrying too. What with the wireless issues I am seeing on both my Macbook and MBP and now this, I am wondering whether Apple have let the ball drop so that they can concentrate on a device (iPhone) rather than their bread and butter (although it looks like they are changing brands).

An update for this would help Apple...

Called Apple to no avail. Only thing that worked was reinstalling Leopard over the old version, saving the settings. This has finally worked to remove the 100% cpu load. Didn't have to reinstall my software.

so, reinstall Leopard without reformatting. It will work.

I can't say I've read every post here but I got the gist the problem is likely some rogue app...

Having systematically quit apps then observed syslogd through Activity Monitor, my problem seems to have been caused by Stuffit's Magic Menu - on killing this CPU returned to normal and battery life improved.

I did note .Mac sync caused a spike, but this died down once sync completed.

Just chiming in in case it's useful.

I've got the same problem.
First, I went to /var/log/, and then checked what was goin on there by typing this :
tail -f /var/log/system.log
And I found there's piling some malloc error reports caused by "Cog".
And I killed the App, "Cog".
But syslogd didn't seem to be taking a rest at all.
Here's how to fix this :

1. stop syslogd
sudo launchdctl stop com.apple.syslogd
2. delete it's log while it's down.
sudo rm -f /var/log/asl.* /var/log/system.log*
3. start syslogd
sudo launchdctl start com.apple.syslogd

You will see it doing fine.

Yes here's a new interesting "My Case" for you all.

MY OPINION: Apple has to acknowledge the issue and they must investigate better options as fix, must be fixable quicker and less drastic than to Archive and Re-install the entire OS.

First of all I want to CONFIRM that after killing the culprit process, to making the syslogd get out of hand, the syslogd will eventually stop. It only has to finish the log tasks kept in memory until all are written to the log file. I noticed that sometimes it takes about 5 minutes (on my 2.2 GHz MacBook) for it to stop after killing the culprit application. Killing syslogd manually does prevent many more megabytes to be written to the disk.

In my case the problem is related to QuickTime 7.5. I First noticed syslogd to go crazy when iTunes 7.7.1 froze on a video podcast immediately after downloading it. Later the quicklook engine on making a thumbnail of a video, and most recently even QuickTime Player caused syslogd to go haywire. ( all cases were related to mp4 or m4v video files. ) Quicktime is certainly software that you cannot disable or kill without losing valuable functionality.

In my case, after a few days of testing and analyzing. the file /var/log/syslog.log contained almost 4 million entries of the same kind (see below). It may hold a clue for the developers:

Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530253200102; outside of file
Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530253200110; outside of file
Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530387417838; outside of file
Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530387417846; outside of file
Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530521635574; outside of file
Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530521635582; outside of file
Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530655853310; outside of file
Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530655853318; outside of file
Aug 25 17:39:42 GiaN [0x0-0x24d24d].com.apple.quicktimeplayer[98605]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 54530790071046; outside of file

I think I have found the solution, which I will paste again here:

I think I have found the solution to this enigma. I had been fighting for many hours with my Mac to get this fixed, I noticed that weirdly enough, my log file was in the hundreds of megs while all the previous ones (the archived ones in .1, .2, etc.) where in the dozens of kB.

Second issue, the permissions on the file were wrong.

So you get to fix it by either:
fixing the permission (manually)
fixing the permission (from Disk Utility)
deleting the file with a "sudo rm"

I hope this helps, and apologies for not taking the time to document this fix precisely.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7985720#7985720

Excellent! That was my problem exactly. My powerpc process was "privoxy", and for some reason it was causing launchd to consume 1.5 GB of RAM, bringing my system to a crawl. Killing privoxy (the only powerpc program) fixed it.