Taskgated and memory usage

Question

Taskgated and memory usage

I've got a Macbook Pro with 3 GB of ram and Leopard; what is driving me crazy is a unix process called taskgated. If I don't put the Macbook to sleep but instead leave it running, this process will consume over 1 GB of ram. I kill it to reclaim the ram and to restore some semblance of performance. But why should this process be eating up so much memory? Bug? Corrupted plist? I can't find anything else in the discussions on this problem or by googling it, so maybe I'm unique?

Macbook Pro 2.33 Ghz, Mac OS X (10.5.3), 3 GB ram

Posted on Jun 4, 2008 10:54 AM

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Answer 1

glsmith

Level 3

875 points

Jun 4, 2008 11:00 AM in response to David Blocher

I have no experience with that daemon, but I did find this:

http://beta.devworld.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/task gated.8.html

It says it is started from launchd, so it's odd that it is always running on your system. Could be a bug in that daemon, or in the kernel. Perhaps connecting gdb to the PID of that daemon to look at the stack?

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Answer 2

glsmith

Level 3

875 points

Jun 4, 2008 12:18 PM in response to glsmith

Duh, or I guess "man taskgated" would be easier 🙂 So I'm sure you've read it and my post above is useless 🙂

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Answer 3

Jun 9, 2008 5:00 AM in response to glsmith

Thanks very much for the suggestion. Taskgated is launched by launchd, and I don't know how to pass the timeout switches. I would like to add the -t switch to those below.

0 6145 1 0 0:02.62 ?? 0:31.83 /usr/libexec/taskgated -p -s

I've got a unix SA at work that I can ask, since this goes beyond my ken.
Thanks for your replies.

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Answer 4

glsmith

Level 3

875 points

Jun 9, 2008 9:50 AM in response to David Blocher

The configuration file lives in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.taskgated.plist. You can either use the plist editor that Apple provides (might only be there if you have developer tools installed), or you could edit the file directly (it's just a text file). You will need elevated privileges to make the change.

Note that I'm not advocating mucking around with this file, since I don't really understand what that daemon does for the system as a whole. So, muck at your own risk 🙂

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