What is trustevaluationagent and why is it hogging my RAM?!

Question

Level 1

8 points

What is trustevaluationagent and why is it hogging my RAM?!

Activity Monitor shows "trustevaluationagent" is using >700MB of RAM. This happened earlier today, so I quit it, and now it's back. What the **** is it?! I've never noticed it before.

Erik

MacBook Pro 17", Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Oct 9, 2009 3:58 PM

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Answer 1

txnole

Level 1

10 points

Oct 9, 2009 5:07 PM in response to eirkeirkeirk

Are you running torrents? Kismet? Some application is jumping all over your Airport. Have you installed all of the System Updates? Have you updated all of your regularly used apps? Something is pounding your Airport. I would wager it's your torrent software.

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Answer 2

eirkeirkeirk Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 9, 2009 7:25 PM in response to txnole

No torrent software. I am thinking it might have something to do with a script I just started running to sync NotationalVelocity with SimpleNote ( http://billyd.net/post/204970320/simple-notes-that-sync-minus-the-stink). That's the only thing I can think of changing over the past few days. It seemed to be working fine, but then today I noticed some major sync conflicts, so I think the two might be related. I've stopped the script from running every 5 minutes and will see if that keeps the issue from popping up.

Thanks for the note.

Erik

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Answer 3

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Oct 10, 2009 4:42 PM in response to eirkeirkeirk

Just because a process shows RAM in Activity monitor doesn't necessarily mean it's "hogging" it.

When a process releases memory, OSX puts it in the Inactive category, sort of "soft-assigned" to the process; it doesn't go back to Free as you might expect.

This is to make it much faster to reassign it back to that process, if needed.

When another process needs memory, OSX takes it first from the Free category; if there isn't enough available Free memory, it will take it from the Inactive memory.

To tell whether you're really having a memory problem, click the +System Memory+ tab towards the bottom. The Total of Free and Inactive memory is what's available for use without paging. If there's more than a little there, there's no problem.

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Answer 4

eirkeirkeirk Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 10, 2009 7:17 PM in response to Pondini

It was most definitely "hogging" it. There was no free RAM left and the pie was nearly all red and yellow. I was also running Photoshop, Flash, Safari, in addition to the usual suspects. The reason I bothered checking Activity Monitor was because things were clearly running sluggish, and the trustevaluationagent was by far the biggest RAM eater.

Anyhow, it seems to have been caused by that SimplenoteSync script that I was trying to run every 5 minutes to sync Simplenote with NotationalVelocity. The past two times I saw that trustevaluationagent was in Activity Monitor and gobbling up RAM, I also saw that NotationalVelocity was giving me warnings that some notes had been deleted from my hard drive. I'm pretty sure the two were related. Since killing the script, things have been fine.

So the question remains, what exactly does "trustevaluationagent" do?

Erik

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Answer 5

Ed Kraus

Level 1

96 points

Oct 10, 2009 7:25 PM in response to eirkeirkeirk

i'd hate to say this, but i've read 2 other threads on this, both said clean install was the way to go, also another offsite said, that it's a Install issue.

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Answer 6

Oct 21, 2009 5:20 PM in response to eirkeirkeirk

I have a similar issue. What exactly is trustevaluationagent? I posted my problem over here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2206733&tstart=0

Thanks,
Mark

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