appstoreagent is repeatedly, frequently crashing my machine, day two

Well it is not quite 24 hours but close enough that I am going to declare victory.

I have have not seen one appearance of appstoreagent since deleting com.apple.appstoreagent folder in Caches yesterday afternoon - and I have purposely done things, besides time which alone should cause many occurrences, to cause appstoreagent to appear and fight the "good" fight. Nothing.

Memory use is stable now; much more HDD space was recovered - have no clue why. This iMac is sailing along now as it was before 12.3, although Safari is doing some strange things with 12.3.1. Anyway, good enough.

I have only run into these cache folders with Activity Monitor - and that was some time ago and a minor annoyance. These agents (and Apple uses a lot of agents) are not apps in the user sense but I will have to remember to try deleting the relevant cache folder in the future when things go south like this with non-user-controlled elements. Only 2.5 weeks of misery - I have no idea if Apple clears these cache folders when new builds come out but they should. If they do, it was probably the initial installd crash that left this folder untouched. But I bet they do nothing about these cache folders.

I am watching appstoreagent come up on Activity Monitor for the fifth time in about an hour as I type. I am about to kill it from there again. It seems to slow down for a bit, then rapidly accumulate RAM; and with the delay in Activity Monitor display of data, it can hang pretty quickly from there.

I am hoping that at some point it sill stop, that it is trying to finish something that was started during the upgrade [Just killed appstoreagent.] but was interrupted by one of the many crashes. App Store does not indicate anything needs to be upgraded so I have no clue what it is looking for.

One thing that I did was to set the sleep time to the lowest value, 1 min. That way, if I walk away from the machine, the processor goes to sleep before appstoreagent can hang the system while I am away. But it can be close. On trying to log back once yesterday, it had hit 4.54 GB of RAM somehow. But so far, mostly working.

Just keep Activity Monitor open, watch, and quit it from there. That's all I can do for now.

Thanks, yes.

In a long winded sort of way, I thought I was clear but the main problem is appstoreagent (a related problem is loss of HDD available space during the crash of installd - some of that has recovered this morning - this may be what the repeated appearances of appstoreagent is trying to do but it is consuming RAM to the point that my desktop crashes if I do not stop it).

appstoreagent just popped up as I was typing this, rapidly consuming RAM. I just quit it again from Activity Monitor.

How do I get appstoreagent to stop doing this?

Or is this how the lost HDD space is recovered from the installd crash and I just have to wait for appstoreagent to complete this, while avoiding crashes due to RAM consumption?

OK, will give that a shot. As it did last night, appstoreagent is quiet right now, so testing will have to resume tomorrow. I have not tried Safe Mode before, but will give it shot now. See what happens over the next day or so.

Thanks.

Uh oh.

Let me guess. This requires a wired keyboard, right? I realized that after my other reply. I tried it anyway but I think it was a normal restart.

This is an iMac with a wireless keyboard. I will have to arrange for a wired keyboard.

Hmmm... interesting idea but it connects via Bluetooth and that connection process is dead during boot-up, I assume.

I will give that a try but I am not sure how that gets around the "wireless" problem.

Well, first of all, that is some good information about the "Magic Keyboard." I was not aware that the lightning port on the keyboard was used for anything other than charging, despite what the Bluetooth menu was telling me. I assumed that the keyboard was still using Bluetooth for communication. I have since seen a few postings indicating that one can use this keyboard in non-Bluetooth systems this way. Interesting.

This time (charging the keyboard), I appear to have gotten into Safe Mode; I had thought the "Safe Mode" indication was shown after boot up. But apparently it is only shown before login. After a very long wait for that login window, I only looked in the upper right after logging in. Oh well. However, it was definitely is a very, very strange set-up. [I obviously have never tried Safe Mode in all my years of Mac usage.]

And thankfully, appstoreagent was well-behaved in this mode. It bounced between 5.1MB and 5.4MB. Generally, by the time Activity Monitor spots it a normal boot-up, it's already in the hundreds of MB and asymptotically increasing from there. Due to display time lags in AM, if it gets to 1GB or 2GB, I have to quit it, the memory leakage can be occurring so rapidly at that point as to hang the machine or make it very difficult to kill appstoreagent. I watched appstoreagent for about 15 minutes in Safe Mode and it stayed within the bounds I mentioned. And so I restarted normally.

Sadly, appstoreagent came back as before, when I returned to a normal boot-up; it started at 50MB and then began its asymptotic increase to 1.3GB when I quit it. It was quite slow this time though, and I am not seeing it as I type. Compressed memory (which is what I usually watch as a danger signal) is very low right now.

And some HDD space did return. I suppose if I feel sporty later, I will let appstoreagent run its course and see if things hang again.

But I will probably have to wait for a new release to wipe the slate clean and continue to deal with this problem as I have been until then.

Thanks for this information though.

Typos typos - drive me nuts.

* ...it was definitely i[n] a very, very strange set-up.

*...by the time Activity Monitor spots it [in] a normal boot-up...

Anyway, thanks for that. I had read about that mode but never tried it. But as I think again, the 12.3 update did finish updating. I suppose another try at it can't hurt except for time. Now I am not sure if another try, even the next release, will fix this if there is some bug in appstoreagent that I have excited. I mentioned previously that the appstoreagent problem crashed my desktop during the first attempt to update. It appeared that the update process started from the beginning, with downloading it, when I tried again after a hard reboot.

When you say "reinstall," is that basically starting from scratch? That might be worthwhile. I will look into that. Maybe these OS updates do not "reinstall" but simply delete/add to what's there. These things take hours already - do you have any idea how long a "reinstall" might take? But I will try during my next slow point.