Q: SystemUIserver using 90+% of CPU

I had exactly the same problem at the changeover from DST. The MBP fan went crazy and CPU was 90% pegged with the SystemUIServer process going nuts.

What worried me more was my iPhone. It grew wings, flew around my apartment, and then attacked me. I managed to beat it back and confined it to my closet, but it is making shrill, satanic sounds as I write this and I am very afraid of going near it.

Clearly, Apple needs to fix this.

Dang this is so weird... I am watching movies on hulu... not a big deal.. and my CPU it spiking deadly temperatures.. I was monitoring it at 90 Celsius... I was afraid it was going to burn its self out... I messed around in activity monitor and after multiple reboots nothing..... I did some searching and found info about what that evil SystemUIserver.... finally I have my CPU down to 56 degrees... it is hard to imagine that 2 minutes ago my CPU was clocking over 150% the temperature it is now.... I am so glad I found this discussion before any serious damage was done.. I must say though that my menu bar looks very lonely now.. well... thanks guys .. and back to my movie.. I am kind of ****** at apple for almost letting my system fry

Bleestha wrote:
I must say though that my menu bar looks very lonely now...

Fortunately the menu bar doesn't have to look very lonely for too long. Once the local time hits 2AM, you can put the TIME & DATE display back into the Menu Bar, and there shouldn't be any surge in CPU activity. If anything, there will be a 2% increase for a few seconds while the system is processing the activity.

The iPhone got out of my closet. (I think it squeezed itself under the door).

I am in terror. Apple programmers didn't see this one coming. They are as stupid as Microsofties. The DST changeover is going to ...

OH!!! Wait!!! It's now 2:00 a.m.

The CPU utilization insanity just ended. My iPhone threw itself to the floor and exploded like those brain creatures on the old Star Trek.

All is well, now.

Thank you, Apple, for making a bug that lasted for only one hour .....

This problem has been confirmed to exist only during the time period repeated during the Daylight Savings Time changeover. In the U.S. and Canada at least, this typically means between the "first" 2:00 am and the "second" 2:00 am.

No doubt it is a relatively minor bug that has a minor fit wondering why time is suddenly repeating itself.

For those who comment on how terrible Apple is to let this sort of this thing slip through testing, I'd suggest allowing them some lenience. After all, this bug by its very nature will only pop up for an hour once every year, so it's a bit tricky to test (since time doesn't "repeat itself" in the same manner in spring, I doubt the same thing will happen then). Of course, they should have tested this "boundary case".. but as a programmer myself, I can easily see how this bug would have slipped by. It's not exactly the end of the world folks - fortunately most people are asleep at 2:00 am anyway and will never have noticed it... and for those of us who did, I take it nobody's motherboard has melted away. It's more of an interesting temporary anomaly than a serious oversight. Think of it as an Easter Egg

Of course, the real problem isn't the operating system getting confused by Daylight Savings Time, but rather the concept of Daylight Savings Time itself... but that's a whole other issue

same issue here, at the moment dls hit SystemUIserver went into overdrive. I removed the clock from the menubar and all went back to normal ...

Yup, happened to me too :P what a weird little bug. Doubt that many people are going to notice it though. The only reason I did was because I stayed up all night watching a scary movie...

mused2B wrote:
same issue here, at the moment dls hit SystemUIserver went into overdrive. I removed the clock from the menubar and all went back to normal ...

+1
Removed the clock and everything is fine again.
Brian

Mine too has started today to behave that way.
I suspect is something related to one of the processes owning an icon on the menu bar.
I will investigate.

Update

Disabling date/time on the menu bar fixs the problem.

Luca

Dan Charrois wrote:
This problem has been confirmed to exist only during the time period repeated during the Daylight Savings Time changeover. In the U.S. and Canada at least, this typically means between the "first" 2:00 am and the "second" 2:00 am.

Once the "second" 2:00 hit I put the clock back in the menu bar and everything is fine.
Brian

Nicely-timed Easter egg? An Easter egg on Halloween!

DID THIS BUG WAKE SLEEPING MACS TO RUN THEIR CPU'S FOR AN HOUR?

or only affected already-awake rigs?

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/DOCUMENTATION/CoreFoundation/Reference/CF TimeUtils/Reference/reference.html

The strings I was seeing in an Activity Monitor sample of SystemGUIServer during the extra high activity between 1:59 EDT and 2:00 EST this morning are found in the above document if anyone has the time and ability to investigate the issue further. I didn't copy the samples but do remember seeing "CFAbsoluteTimeAddGregorianUnits" constantly appearing in the samples.

Same issue as others have had. Though originally intended to be posted to this thread, somehow my post ended up on another related thread. See details here:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10499969#10499969

Basically, issue occurred on

* 2006 MacBook Pro (2.0GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM) running Mac OS X 10.6.1 "Snow Leopard"
* two (2) 2008 Xserves (Xeon quadcore systems, 6GB RAM) running Mac OS X Server 10.6.1 "Snow Leopard"

The issue did NOT occur on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 20" iMac running Mac OS X 10.5.8 "Leopard". From small sample set, this indicated the issue may be restricted to "Snow Leopard" only.

In all cases SystemUIServer was consuming the CPU, with both cores on the MacBook Pro running full tilt, and on the Xerves at least one core spiking to 100%.

On the MacBook Pro, I also noticed the following entries appearing over and over again in the Console system log:

"Nov 1 01:04:53 MacBook-Pro-15 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.newsyslog): Throttling respawn: Will start in 1 seconds
Nov 1 01:04:54: --- last message repeated 1958 times ---"

with the number of seconds varying from 1 to 10 seconds. I can't even begin to count the number of entries showing.

Restarting the MacBook Pro did not help. As soon as it was back up, SystemUIServer once again inhaled the CPU and the entries returned.

Eventually I gave up, powered down the MacBook Pro, went to the iMac, logged into this discussion forum, and searched and found this thread. I tried what was suggested in turning off the clock on the menu bar, and that did make the issue go away. Re-enabling the clock, however, brought the issue right back (note this was during the 1:-2:AM EDT timeframe, with the changeover occurring at the beginning of that hour cycle).

In the end, I simply disabled the menu bar clock on all systems and called it a night.

Today, I found the MacBook Pro behaving normally once again. The CPU spiked after initial login, but it subsided within a minute or two and even with the menu bar clock enabled, all is fine once again.

I hope Apple fixes this bug before the next time change, as it caused a bit of aggravation to say the least.

And to the forum moderators who censored my previous post to this thread earlier today, I say, "Seriously?"

My laptop which I was using was pegged and so was my 24' iMac which was supposedly still sleeping with fans a whirring.