syslogd hogging CPU

Same issue here since upgrading to 10.5.1. Turned off Time Machine and Back To My Mac and CPU Usage dropped dramatically....

I was having the same problems.

I turned off "Back to My Mac" but syslogd continued to hog the CPU. I then turned Time Machine backup's off because I was not connected to my back up drive and this fixed the syslogd issue.

Hi Everyone,

Same problem here except not running Back-to-Mac or Time Machine. In my case the problem was with iDisk syncing. I disable iDisk sync and syslogd CPU utilization returned to normal.

What is interesting is that I booted the machine and logged in with a used ID that is not linked to a .Mac account so I couldn't access any .Mac settings. I had to login as as the user that is linked to the .Mac and turn off iDisk syncing in order to get the syslogd utilization to return to normal. My guess is that this has something to do with the OS trying to sync an iDisk that the current user does not have access to. It seems the problems is that the OS can't tell whether or not the current user has setup a .Mac account.

Hope this helps.

I don't have Back To My Mac enabled, and turning off Time Machine has no effect. I've tried disabling just about everything I can think of but so far nothing seems to help!

Had the same problem. Activity Monitor showed HEAVY use by syslogd.

Console showed 4,000 entries in a 2 minute time-span for "frozen" Radar In Motion and Apple Weather widgets.

Killed Dashboard Clients and syslogd and upon restart everything is back to normal for the time being...

Same problem here.
I'm running 10.5.2.
The syslogd gone wild has just started - I have no idea yet what might be the reason. The log's don't show any significant activity.
One strange thing is that I had tried 'syslog' and 'syslog -w' in a Terminal, but they didn't show anything, they just hang.
half a minute later, though, the CPU hogging stopped ... I have no idea if this is related to my executing the syslog command (and stopping it after a little while).

Best regards,
Gabriel.

With 'syslogd -w' I see that,in my case, I get thousends of error messages from Mail (3.2) reading
'Wed Feb 20 21:19:26 nbzachneu Mail[406] <Warning>: lexer results overflow'

Best regards,
Gabriel.

syslogd process was taking all CPU and memory while 2G of virtual memory was taken on my hard drive that was working while I had no application running.

I'm reading your posts and I must say that I doubt that this behavior is only related to either Back-To-My-Mac, Time Machine and Dashboard since none was running when I was experiencing the issue.

apparently this is happening with 10.5.2 as well.

syslogd process was again taking all of my PowerBook ressources. this time, no application was running. in fact, the computer was supposed to be in sleep mode but was not. realizing this, I look at Activity Monitor to see again syslogd taking all ressources.

I reboot the PowerBook and look back at syslogd in the ActivityMonitor. The process is still there taking 0% CPU with only a few Meg of RAM. Someone knows more about this strange behavior?

? why is this question marked as answered?

I will start a new topic on this because I doesn't feel that we had answered the question!

I still have yet to find an answer. I'm not using .Mac or Time Machine (nor have I used either with the only account on my computer) and I'm getting this syslogd issue. It is not solved by restarting and renders the computer slow and unresponsive. This is not acceptable.

Has anyone found any answers short of disabling syslogd?

hi kyle,

I still have this is a very strange behavior also. Since this post have been mark as answer, I had start another post on this topic here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1408771&tstart=0

on my computer, the issue is intermittant. If you can seek your logs as suggested in the above mention post, maybe it will help us to gather information to understand what is happening here.

that's getting now a huge problem in Leopard. syslogd is out of control, not only taking all CPU and memory but now, I just realized that the log file it is writing are incredibly large and have gone between 800Meg to 1G.

while I do not see a lot of post on this subject, I had found many on other forums;
http://www.virb.com/schrader/blog/531389
http://tips4mac.blogspot.com/2008/05/syslogd-maxing-your-processor-at-100.html
http://smartic.us/2007/11/8/leopard-100-cpu-usage-caused-by-syslogd-and-possibly -time-machine
http://forums.mactalk.com.au/13/39269-syslogd-using-100-my-cpu-leopard.html

none of them gives a satisfactory answer on this issue. everyone is blaming either 3rd party application or Apple software as well as Leopard's Back-To-My-Mac or Time Machine. There is no coherence between all this.

The best post I found so far is this one;
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1203511
but still, no good answer.

I quite surprise of seeing all these forum talking about this strange and unacceptable Leopard's behaviour. It seems to me that syslogd is have a significant discrepency. Based on all this, I will give a chance to fresh and new installation of Leopard hoping this will solve the issue.