AddressBookManager chewing up all available memory

I think I found the problem, if you are sharing your address book, you run into this problem. go to your address book, preferences > accounts > click on sharing > make sure "share your address book" is not checked. addressbookmanager should disappear from your activity monitor shortly after.

I am having the same problem on my MacBook running Snow Leopard 10.6.2. I had recently turned on Address Book sharing and I did also have MobileMe syncing of contacts turned on. I have turned both off but the problem persists through multiple restarts.

Another symptom is that even though I turned off Address Book sharing - in Address Book preferences, I removed the shared Address Book and turned off sharing altogether - the address book that I am sharing still appears in the left-hand list in Address Book and I can view individual entries.

In my Activity Monitor, AddressBookManager, for instance, right now shows it is using 98.4% of my CPU and my Mac is too sluggish to use effectively for most purposes. Console shows a huge list of errors like this one:

1/19/10 12:19:52 PM AddressBookManager[3273] ABRecord (ABCDSubscribedContact) valueForProperty: com.apple.speech.ABSpeakable - unknown property

Help! Is there some preference I need to delete?

I have the same problem. It has been going on for about a week+. My Mac mail and other mail apps hang, and hang. My OS freezes quite often. The cursor moves but all other apps come to a complete stand still for two or three minutes. And overall system response is extremely sluggish. In the Activity Monitor, I noticed that AddressBookManager was using an extremely high amount of memory (2.8 gig + of virtual memory). On a lark a quite this process and, wow, did my computer become responsive! And it remain that way most of the day. Since then when I noticed my computer slowing down a bit I go to Activity Monitor and quit the process and wow, what a difference! Does anyone know what this process does and what software uses it? I as had the problem with the fan winding up and becoming very loud!

Has anyone found a solution to this issue? The problem described here is exactly what I am seeing. I spoke to Apple Support, and they tell me this isn't an Apple process even!?
It's driving me nuts - started a couple of days ago, and now happening a few times a day.

Thanks
Bob

add me to the addressbookmanager issue list. started only after upgrading from 10.5 to 10.6.3. quickly this process consumes all of the CPU and up to 1.5G of real memory. Obviously a problem.

this has been accompanied by data loss and data duplication (both fields and address cards).

I have address book sharing turned on and sync with mobileme and google turned on.

Add me to the list as well. I just turned off AddressBook sharing which made the problem go away but was not having this issue at all until a couple of weeks ago.

The computer would slow to crawl on and off throughout the day. It was driving me crazy.

Glad the workaround is working but would like to see it fixed in the future.

This "addressbookmanager" stuff has taken over my wife's iMac running 10.6.4. I'll try turning off sharing in Address Book.app also, but is this a "bug" or a "virus?" I'm getting tired of throwing out the .plist files for Address Book and I usually just kill it through Activity Monitor, but this is very annoying. I hope someone is monitoring these post and comes up with a solution.

Just to add to the list, my wife has had the same issues (Macbook2,1 running 10.6.4) for the past few weeks. Like other posts I killed the AddressBookManager and freed up the memory but it would resume grabbing memory fairly quickly. Currently I am trying the option of disabling Address Book Sharing after reading the posts above. The only other thing to add to the mix is that she is a heavy user of MobileMe syncing to her iPhone, as she relies on this for managing her calendar, contacts and mail. Like rlfitz I am hoping that someone is monitoring this thread!!

Message was edited by: john.hare

A friend (a real Mac Guru) suggested the following solution to me and it worked:

"Sounds like the address book is screwed up. I'm assuming you tried turning off sharing and any kind of syncing to see if that was causing it, but had little luck.

So the next step is to rebuild it. First things first, open Address Book and do an export of all your data. Make sure it's got a backup. Then quit address book. Then go into your user's home directory and Library folder. In Application Support rename the "address book" folder to something else (like Old address book). Go ahead and trash the plists again too.

Relaunch address book and see if it's empty. If it is, great. If not, then something is syncing with it. Check MobileMe preferences, missing sync, etc. If you still can't get it to stay empty, let me know and we'll look into cleaning out your sync preferences." (I didn't have to email him further.)

"Once it's an empty address book, let it run for a bit and see if the problem persists. If it doesn't (it's fixed) then re-import your data from the export file into the new (freshly made) address book. If the problem remains, then it's not the application support files and your address book data, but the program itself. You can delete the new "address book" folder from Application Support and return your old one to it's original name.

If it's the application then we need to reinstall the program - if you can get Pacifer you can use it to extract the pkg file to just reinstall Address book (it's on the OSX DVD), or you can reinstall the entire OS from the DVD."

I have the same problem, addressbookmanager in activity monitor is taking up 652.7 mb of real memory and 1.93 in virtual memory. my system is slow as a snail right now.

I turned off Synchronize with Google and that seems to have done the trick for me.

turning off google sync seems to have resolved the addressbookmanager issue. however, this is a work around not a solution...