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

i've got the same issue...

Same here on a MDD Tower (Dual 1ghz g4) with a gig of ram. It generally happens after a couple hours of using the computer, on processor is always hitting 90+ % and my system slows to a crawl because all the ram becomes 'in use', so there's lots of paging/VM activity to disk. Only rebooting will fix it for a while.

I did look at the log files and there are like well over 10,000 messages since my last reboot about dashboard widgets being "out of memory" and I think syslogd is just working to track all the system errors due to memory issues.

Not sure why my mem is disappearing until reboot. I'm generally only running Safari, iChat, Mail and maybe one other thing like iTunes. Adding it all up by the numbers in Activity Monitor certainly doesn't leave me with only 12mb of free ram, yet thats what its reporting.

Vanilla install here on G4 PB 1.5GHz

Syslogd is driving me crazy.
Sometimes it's at ~90% for a few minutes, then nada for a while, and whack, right back up there.

Nothing on my Mac "alien" to be causing this.
I normally run QuickSilver, Growl, Perian and Menumeters.
I removed all of these, still syslogd is up there.

I'm glad your radio shack problem fixed your issue, but I think it goes deeper than that...

Rather strange...

OK.. here's where I'm at with troubleshooting this. As I said before, for ME it occurred simultaneous to a low or out of memory situation. I don't know if syslogd was using my the ram, or if the low ram was a symptom of an issue that syslogd was getting caught up in reporting... but the system log file had tens of THOUSANDS of out of memory errors listed. Almost all were from dashboard.

So... I've done the following. In dashboard I closed ALL open widgets. I disabled spaces (since in another thread someone indicated it used a lot of memory). I ran Leopard Cache Cleaner and used it to perform maintenances, run the os scripts and rebuild caches and so on. Rebooted.

Now its working fine! Since then its been over 24 hrs and I STILL have over 300megs of ram reported free on a 1 gig system. I've used everything else like normal (safari, mail, ichat, itunes, etc..). Where the problem used to happen after a couple of hours after a reboot every time, now it seems normal. No out of mem, and syslogd is running normally (apparently).

I will run a few apps that I havent run in a while and see if those create an issue. If not, later today I will enable spaces and see how that does after a few hours. Finally I'll add in the dashboard widgets one at a time to see if the issue lies there. I'll report back here if I discover anything.

I'm guessing everyone having this problem upgraded to Leopard. At least in my case, Time Machine was the culprit. It was running my battery down like crazy on my macbook pro.

Case: syslogd runs out of control; killing the process doesn't stop it because the process reinitiates and picks up right where it left off. The cause is Time Machine doing some sort of logging in prepartion for a backup

Fix:
1)  > System Preferences... > Time Machine: Set switch to 'OFF,' Close Sys Prefs.
2) Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor: select 'syslogd' and click 'Quit Process.' You will have to authenticate.

At this point the process should reinitiate, but CPU/RAM usage should be next to nothing.

Message was edited by: George Stamton

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5690924&#5690924

Wow! I put the iMac to sleep last night, woke up this morning and couldn't even type let alone pull up a website to look this up. Syslogd was running 100.1/98.9, etc. CPU and taking up 1.48gb of real memory and 2.43 virtual.

There were mega spikes all over my activity monitor's little graphic screen.

I clicked on syslogd (13) in the box which then gave me to launched (1), clicked on that which gave me kernel task (0). I couldn't open up logs, etc. so I rebooted.
I see it's still there but now running at 100 CPU, 26 memory. (I also see kernel_task (45mb memory), and WindowServer (37) memory and something called MDS at 22 memory.

Yipes. Seriously, my keyboard didn't work at all. Just the mouse! WTH is this?

I'm surprised there aren't others who posted this same experience here. It worries me.

So I'm getting the same issue. Mac Pro - Leopard... ***

Well I did the remove dashboard and disable spaces and force quit syslogd and it reopened at a high cpu but then went back to normal 0 percent to 1 percent after about 3 mins

I'm having the same issue here. Comparing my installed applications to the ones mentioned here, I installed QuickSilver today, so it's not that, I'm using only the Dictionary Widget, not using Spaces or Time Machine or the Radio Shack software. I am using menu meters though.

Anyone experiencing this while using Azureus ?

I have the exact same issue! I did a clean install of Leopard however.
I've got everything "extra" turned off, and it still persists, even from a reboot.

What's going on? 😟

Message was edited by: Anthony Agius

I have been able to replicate this somewhat.

Logging in from a reboot, and launching activity monitor & console, I am able to observe that anything writing to the system.log file, will cause syslogd to use 100% CPU. As soon as there's no more messages in system.log, CPU use returns to normal. If I do something to write something to log (like connecting to a wireless network, or updating my time server), will cause syslogd to go to 100%

Does anyone know how I can contain this?

Don't know about you guys, but my system.log file (located in /var/log) is 28MB.
I haven't looked into the file to see if there's an application causing so many entries that the file gets to 28MB, but could it be possible that Leopard isn't rotating the logs properly and then syslogd has trouble with sucha a large file ?

Message was edited by: Santiago Riesco

Mine is 230MB - I don't think that's normal...