I just installed Leopard, but now every now and then the CPU use goes up to 190% with a process called DirectoryServices. Forgive my ignorance but what's going on? Applications don't work after a few seconds and all I am left to do is force shut down the computer and re-start. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Gabriel
Although it's hard to have conclusive evidence with an intermittent bug, I can report that I have not seen this problem at all since I changed the networking setup of my Mac Mini. My previous setup was using an airport network with weak reception which would occasionally drop out. My current setup is using wired ethernet to an iBook which then connects to the same wireless network. What is interesting about this is that it's quite possible that the iBook might have lost its connection some time during that time - so the actual contactability of the rest of the world may not be the issue - but the ethernet cable has always been plugged in, so as far as the Mac Mini is concerned, the network connection has always been "there".
Therefore, one of the following three changes appears to have been the solution for me. They may seem to be the same thing, but I'd say there are subtle differences:
1) change from Airport to wired ethernet
2) change from a network connection which occasionally dropped out to one which never does
3) always being able to contact the Internet (this seems least likely)
This problem happens to me, on my MacBook Pro even when connected over wired ethernet. It seems random, but most of the time when I do see the problem is when an application is started and starts looking up an internet address or trying to resolve the uid to an actual username. DirectoryServices seems to handle almost all aspects of name resolution, this is a case where too much functionality was put into one program.
Ok, just to follow up form my earlier posts. I eventually gave up and wiped clean the hard drive, zero level format and reinstalled Leopard. Since then, no more directoryservice issues. One remaining issue is seeing my APE-N
Another call to Apple. Suggestion that this is definitely a problem with some programme trying to access the net but failing, so on advice I've closed most of my widgets - this is what I had open:
- Apple Weather
- BBC Weather
- iCal Events
- MyTube
- iStat Pro
- iStat Nano
- BBC Radio Player
- Amazon Album Artwork
- Wikipedia
I'm keeping iStats and iCal Events open for now, can always kill them later it if persists. I have a hunch that it might be one of my menubar items though - I've got iScrobbler and Gmail Notifier running from startup. If the problem vanishes I can slowly reintroduce stuff I want back until it falls over.
Dashboard is completely disabled on my system, and I only have iStat running in the background.
The problem for me appears randomly in that it happens even when I am just using the machine, and I am connected to IRC. Everything appears normal until I hear my fans rev up, at which point if I open up Activity Monitor just in time I might get lucky and be able to force quit DirectoryServices. Otherwise, hard reboot it is.
iStat is not set to check for updates, and only shows fan speed and CPU speed.
I just purchased a MacBook for my wife and soon after she applied the 10.5.1 update, things started to act really strange. The system is really sluggish and periodically will freeze not letting type anything at all. I reviewed the crash logs and DirectoryService is creating havoc on the system. I'm getting all kinds of crazy entries from the DirectoryService in the system.log as well:
Jan 27 16:43:42 cynthia's-macbook DirectoryService[32]: DirectoryService(32,0xb039e000) malloc:
* error for object 0x235e20: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed.\n
* set a breakpoint in malloc
errorbreak to debug
Jan 27 16:43:42 cynthia's-macbook DirectoryService[32]: DirectoryService(32,0xb039e000) malloc:
* error for object 0x235fd0: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed.\n
* set a breakpoint in malloc
errorbreak to debug
Jan 27 16:43:42 cynthia's-macbook com.apple.DirectoryServices[32]: DirectoryService(32,0xb039e000) malloc:
* error for object 0x235e20: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed.
I ran disk utility and practically every application directory has files with permissions set incorrectly. This is really annoying. I can no longer open 'Activity Monitor' to check out what's going on. I had to open Terminal and use the 'top' command. I'm still waiting on DiskUtility to complete as we speak. Hopefully, this will clear things up. However, judging from responses on the forum, I shouldn't expect much from it. We'll see.
Well, I finally gave up , reformatted the Macbook HD and started fresh with a clean install of 10.5 and the subsequent 10.51 patch. So far so good and no issue with this. I have other issues now, like not seeing my closed AE wireless:)
I haven't suffered the accursed 190% for a while and I suspect it's down to dropping Google Notifier (only ever used for Gmail on my Mac). I'm not on 10.5.2 yet, but since dropping Notifier seem to have been OK.
Hi all,
since I upgraded to 10.5.2 it seems that the annoying system load of DirectoryService has gone. According to the update information they fixed an Active Directory issue...
Let's hope and see...
Issue still remains here after upgrading to 10.5.2, if not even worse than before.
For some reason, it only affects my Mac Mini at work but not my Mac Book Pro at home.
This problem is still around. I get it perhaps once a week. Just had it with a wired ADSL connection, although my airport is turned on for a Time Capsule. The latter is buggier than Leopard.
I used to have to force powerdown, but find that it will clear itself after 10 minutes or so.
I did force quit the Finder. Mail.app then required force quitting for some reason.
Activity Monitor sometimes displayed Mail's Shared Memory Size: 16,777,216.00 TB
The only strangeness in the log was:
Apr 30 16:43:05 218-165-193-170 Directory[20515]: Directory(20515,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x10d59e0, has non-zero refcount = 1
Apr 30 16:43:05 218-165-193-170 Directory[20515]: Directory(20515,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x10d7380, has non-zero refcount = 1
Apr 30 16:43:05 218-165-193-170 Directory[20515]: Directory(20515,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x10d7ff0, has non-zero refcount = 1
Apr 30 16:43:05 218-165-193-170 Directory[20515]: Directory(20515,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x10d8b50, has non-zero refcount = 1
Apr 30 16:43:05 218-165-193-170 [0x0-0x785785].com.apple.Directory[20515]: Directory(20515,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x10d59e0, has non-zero refcount = 1
Apr 30 16:43:05 218-165-193-170 [0x0-0x785785].com.apple.Directory[20515]: Directory(20515,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x10d7380, has non-zero refcount = 1
Apr 30 16:43:05 218-165-193-170 [0x0-0x785785].com.apple.Directory[20515]: Directory(20515,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x10d7ff0, has non-zero refcount = 1
Apr 30 16:43:05 218-165-193-170 [0x0-0x785785].com.apple.Directory[20515]: Directory(20515,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x10d8b50, has non-zero refcount = 1
A
