syslogd is out of control

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Level 1

2 points

syslogd is out of control

I am having severe problems with the background process syslogd. It consumes 80% - 100%+ of the processor on my 24" 2.16 GHz iMac. This has popped up in the past, but force quitting syslogd has always knocked it back down. Lately, nothing seems to be able to stop it. I have tried force quitting it, I have tried logging out (it comes back within a minute or two of logging back in), I have tried unplugging all of my FW/USB devices, I have tried stopping Time Machine, and I have tried deleting the log files suggested in this forum http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6689089, as well as deleting the system.log file which had swelled to nearly a gigabyte.

So what now? This problem seems to be wide-spread but elusive. All suggestions I have found have been temporary at best. At this point it is using up so much of my computer's processing power that it is effecting the performance of the applications I'm using, not to mention all the power I am wasting on this errant background process.

2.16 GHz Core 2 iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Aug 24, 2008 1:44 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 24, 2008 1:52 PM in response to delventhalz

What's being written to the system.log file? Is syslog 'running away'? or is it some other process writing zillions of entries to the log?

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Answer 2

delventhalz Author

Level 1

2 points

Aug 24, 2008 2:19 PM in response to tele_player

That is a good question, but I can't really say since I deleted the file. However, I think I have just fixed the problem myself, and while sylogd was going nuts, I could actually watch the file size of system.log going up, and now it is hanging steady at 4KB. So I'm pretty sure it was syslogd, and not another process.

Anyway, I discovered the issue was with my Griffin radioShark, not the hardware itself (like I said I had tried unplugging all USB devices) but the software associated with it. Even after quitting radioShark, and program called RadioSharkServer (which was PowerPC) stuck around with 30% - 50% CPU, along with syslogd's 80% - 100%. Force quitting both of them solved the problem until the next time I started radioShark.

On a lark I went back to Griffin's website. I say on a lark because they stopped supporting the radioShark a long time ago. But, it turns out they do have new software available, 2.0.2, which is Universal and also designed for Leopard. If you have a radioShark and are have similar issues, go to http://www.griffintechnology.com/support/products/radioshark and click on Downloads on the left. The new software should take care of it.

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