This just started happening to my macbook pro as well. I just noticed it this week that whenever I receive emails with any type of media file in them, mail jumps to 100% CPU as soon as that email is opened. This must be related to quicklook working on the attachments. I believe it started happening after the most recent update of Airport extreme on 10/29/08. I don't recall having this problem before I installed that update. Thumbs down for Apple quality control on this one.
I noticed yesterday that a in the Activity Manager a program called "syslogd" was eating up my processor power and battery (yes, almost complete drained within the hour), when the computer was just sitting on the desk in my hotelroom.
The MacBook Pro was only started from being standby, and no Mail or any program whatsoever was running, so only the Finder and it even did not go into standby because it was being uattended for quite a while... what in Earth is going on!!.... I am desparate now and can only think of doing a complete blank install when I am home from being on tour (roadying).
I have a deja-vue, you cannot imagine how much time I already wasted on installing Windows XP on my previous PC based laptops and now I am back to square one with an Apple. How disappointing and what an embarrassment!!!
This weekend: "The drastic method" - Reinstall the box like in the good old Windows times and keep fingers crossed.
I don't like it at all but I'm tired of the problem and always having to close the Mail application.
Same here, it is set to 5 minutes. I am taking mine to Geniuses today, will let you know what transpires. Really dreading reinstalling everything as I just did, a few months ago, and besides, I switched not to have to reinstall anything, ever, silly me. Nope, its not a solution for me. Already tried replacing RAM to no effect (I had 2 gigs laying around from my MBP), and just dont know what else to do. There was a thoughtful suggestion to just let it sit while the mail is "being indexed", but i think my MB was running Mail "day in day out" -- till i started noticing it became so power hungry and noisy, and my 10K of messages were there from the beginning. I am giving the "indexing" idea a shot right now still, but doubt anything will come out of it. This is really weird.
In comparison, my MBP is running Mail totally cool at low CPU use, but, i don't think i downloaded all of the Gmail messages onto it, it just set it up with POP and I rarely use it for mail anyway. I do suspect that the heavy use of CPU on my MB comes from the fact that all of my messages are on my MB, but afterall, wasnt Mail designed to manage just that? Nowhere does it say, oh, you can only use it with 500 messages tops with no PDF attachments, or am i being naive/expecting too much from my Mac?
Reinstall the box like in the good old Windows times.
You don't need to do that; not only will it wipe out everything you have, it probably isn't necessary. Instead, you can just do an Archive & Install, with the Preserve Users and Network Settings option. This will install a fresh copy of Mac OS X and put the old one in a folder named Previous System, which you can then delete. No files, programs or settings are erased.
You would need to manually download the 10.5.5 Combo Update from the Apple web site and install it, then use Software Update to bring the rest of your system current. Then you should test Mail again to see if the problem is still there.
Anyone who's having problems with Mail using 100% of the cpu, open Activity Monitor (in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder) if it's not already running. Select Mail in the list and click the "Sample Process" button in the Activity Monitor window's toolbar. (If that button isn't available, choose View > Customize Toolbar, and add it to the toolbar).
Copy and paste the output of the sample to a post here so we can look at it.
Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):
17
pthreadstart
17 thread_start
9 mach_msg
9 mach
msgtrap
8 CFRunLoopRunSpecific
6 CFRunLoopRunInMode
5 PrivateMPEntryPoint
Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
mach
msgtrap 7731
_semwaitsignal 3868
semaphore
timedwait_signaltrap 2772
kevent 1934
_workqops 967
select$DARWIN_EXTSN 967
Sample analysis of process 379 written to file /dev/stdout
Previous Sample was at normal behaviour
The sample at the time Mail is freaking is too big for this forum's database (like already said above).
Looking for a solution to post it.
Well, guess what, taking my MB to Geniuses did not reveal a thing. They confirmed that the Mail is unusually CPU-hungry, suggested taking mailboxes off, to see which of the two might be the source.
Well, I tried archiving and rebuilding to no effect. Further, I made a backup with Time Machine on an external drive, and loaded it all as a profile on a different Mac, my 2.2 MBP with 4 gigs of Ram. Well, MBP had no problem reading this Mail file and all the 10K+ messages and it basically behaves totally cool, just like it should. The question is: what is wrong with MB?
Mine did not go "warm" after reading this sugggestion, but it is good to read about a new approach to the problem, great that there are still some people out there that can have a serious look at this, in addition to the "what if..." sollutions.
The next question is: how are we going to post the log? In parts perhaps?
I will try posting it in parts but its loong! Having thought about this and the fact that the same Mail and the whole universe is running totally fine on my MBP loaded from backup on TM as a profile, I am beginning to suspect that a processor is shot in my MB... I tried different Ram, did not fix it. IS there a test for processors for these puppies?
Regarding the number of people that suffer from this problem, I think a hardware related cause is very unlikely. The difference in percentage problems against chances of hardware failure is just too big...
But to be sure, perhaps an expert can shine his/her light over the question wheather the build in OS/Apple diagnostics include a full CPU checkup (please no suggestions any more, wasting people's time is bad karma! ;-))
Unlike what my friend is saying here, i think hardware failure is still a possibility; and please share any suggestions you may have. My next step is to load the backup from TC to the same MB to see if it would read the Mail normally, just like my MBP does.
