Just wanted to chime in and say that this tip worked for me. I was being plagued by this problem multiple times a day - and this solution seems to have kept the dreaded aslmanager away for a few days now.
Thank you. This thing was killing my system and I had no clue what to do. Your fix has so far, held up nicely. I now have my CPU back. I appreciate it.
sudo killall aslmanager frees up 512 - 1.5 GB of my 2 GB of ram and 95% CPU and looks like I need to do it now
see results at dmmcintyre3.atspace.com/killaslmanager.png
I noticed that aslmanager is also a memory hog. I tried just killing the aslmanager initially, but aslmanager will keep firing hogging your mac until you clean out / delete the database that is causing the problem.
I still have no clue what caused the problem, but it has not reappeared in the last week.
Same issue. For about the last 3 weeks my MBP would become unusable once every 24 hours or so. If I managed to shut everything down and reboot before it became unresponsive, I'd be okay for another day but if I didn't, ASLManager and Parallels would compete for CPU, with ASLManager monopolizing RAM until the whole shebang slowed to a crawl. I noted ASLManager consuming as high as 2.15GB RAM and 90%+ CPU.
Upon finding this post, I discovered several "LongTTL.U*" files in the /var/log/asl/ directory, of which LongTTL.new was 1.92 GB in size. I followed Haje's instructions for stopping the services, removing the directory contents from /var/log/asl/, and restarting. Everything has remained calm for the 48 hours since; best 48 hours I've experienced in the last 3 weeks.
On my system, crazy syslogd & aslmanager processor load was caused by a (new to me) beta app called Querious, an awesome & very new GUI MySQL relational database manager.
Many entries appeared in Console.app system.log like:
Feb 24 22:02:59 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:03:29: --- last message repeated 77961 times ---
Feb 24 22:03:28 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:03:59: --- last message repeated 68668 times ---
Feb 24 22:03:58 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:04:29: --- last message repeated 78371 times ---
Feb 24 22:04:28 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:04:59: --- last message repeated 77074 times ---
Feb 24 22:04:58 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:05:29: --- last message repeated 74020 times ---
Feb 24 22:05:28 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:05:59: --- last message repeated 70501 times ---
Feb 24 22:05:58 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:06:29: --- last message repeated 75047 times ---
Feb 24 22:06:28 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:06:59: --- last message repeated 75954 times ---
Feb 24 22:06:58 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:07:29: --- last message repeated 75101 times ---
Feb 24 22:07:28 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:07:59: --- last message repeated 77856 times ---
Feb 24 22:07:58 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:08:29: --- last message repeated 77455 times ---
Feb 24 22:08:28 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:08:59: --- last message repeated 76606 times ---
Feb 24 22:08:58 wunderkind Querious[3087]: NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!
Feb 24 22:09:17: --- last message repeated 47041 times ---
Holy smokes ~75000 log entries per second! Quitting Querious fixed it for me... so you might want to try checking the logs being written to, to see if some app is killin it.
RE the PC vs Mac issue - Which do you wish to minimize, the mean time between problems or the resolution time of the problem?
You suggest that with a Mac the resolution time may be slightly higher because of less resources (people with the same problem and with answers). Which tends to indicate that perhaps the mean time between problems is greater on the Mac than the PC. And that I would say is more valuable to me!
Thanks for getting this fix out, my wife was complaining about our new Mac and I said it was fine until I tried to use it - sure enough the aslmanager was consuming all memory. Now she will be so happy, maybe...
awesome dude!
thanks a million for the fix. indeed, it worked for me, too. besides the regain of cpu power it also could free some essential gigabytes of wasted (?!) space on my ibook's 40gb hdd.
keep the good work up.
p.s.: you know what's funny? i was sure there was some process in the background causing the 100% load. still i couldn't determine it via activity monitor. every time i checked it i could only see the usage bar going nuts, but in the process list there wasn't anything peculiar. therefore, a rhetorical question: why was the aslmanager-process invisible to me?
