Storeagent process - What is it?

Smart choice. So far Lion is a buggy mess that seems to have different problems on different days (phases of the moon?). Thamk heavens I installed it on a subsidiary Mac that runs my home theater, so it's not causing problems on my main machines. But you know what? Lion is wonderful compared to Safari 5.1. That program is absolutely bizarre. I open a web page, and it randomly opens tabs for things I don't click on, and usually am not interested in. Then, when I go to close the window, I have to get by the "Do you really want to close" box. Throws my workflow rhythm off. It crashes frequently. Webpages tell me I need to install Flash. It IS installed. There's more, but you have stuff to do, and so do I. I have to download Firefox and learn how to use it.

Apple, what happened to quality control? Is it all in the IOS devices, and Mac users are on their own?

Larry

I know it has been quiet a while since you started this duscussion, but today was the first time I recognized this storeagent process.

I downloaded Xcode a few days ago but soon after I deleted it with AppCleaner. Due to that the App Store didn't really get it that Xcode is not installed anymore so it told me that an update was available (which I didn't download of course).

Anyway, today I notized because of Little Snitch's network monitor that something big is being downloaded by storeagent: >500 MB, most likely the Xcode update. Unfortunately I was using my mobile broadband stick which does not have a flatrate, so I was extremely ______ at this _______ process. Well thanks to that Objective Development can consider me now a full-version-user of Little Snitch.

Well you can set software update to not download in the background. This is done through the Software Update preference panel, not the App Store.

Thx! I guess this is new to Mountain Lion.

I also reinstalled Xcode and deleted it the old-fashioned CMD+Backspace way. Does not show up in the App Store's update section anymore.

thank you, this solved my login problems /w the MAS. Accidentally blocked it /w Lil' Snitch 😉

Mee, too. Storeagent ran off downloading GBs of data over my tethered phone. I had shut down App Store, I turned off 'automatically download' etc in System Preferences.

I looked around trying to close other suspect apps and finally found the storeagent process in the task manager, saw that it was consuming CPU. As soon as I killed it, the data i/o flags on the phone disappeared (they had been on constantly as long as the machine was online).

ML keeps sucking compared to SL.

"Storeagent runs only when the App Store application is open. Test it yourself. Launch

Activity Monitor from your Utilities folder and look for the Storeagent process."

I have tested this and it runs occasionally even when the appstore is not open! Also, for some reason it was running my cpu at 114% until i finally forced it to quit via activity monitor... Very troubling.

2013 15" macbookpro retina, 2.7 Ghz

On my Mac it is also running occasionally without the MAS opened.

In Activity Monitor I noticed it had downloaded about 500 MB until I quit the process.

What is being downloaded here?

Updates, if you are using Mavericks

Which updates?

I have disabled the automatic updates.

Until now I had to open the MAS, search for updates, then update accordingly.

What is being downloaded in the background now?

If you have disabled it then it's not updates.

I also have automatic updates disabled, but found the storeagent process downloading at an alarming rate, eating through my precious mobile data package at 1MB/sec for about 30 minutes before I finally noticed the bandwidth and tracked down the offending process with Little Snitch. I've modified my LS rules to block traffic to/from the storeagent process for the time being, but hope to solve this problem so that I can continue using the App Store in the future.

So if I've got automatic updates disabled, what could storeagent possibly be downloading? From what I could tell, most of the traffic was coming from various Akamai CDN endpoints.

I noticed another thread [ https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5544915?start=105&tstart=0 ] mention that the certificate revocation list (CRL) process can be responsible for large bandwidth usage as well, and one commenter on that thread mentioned the "storeagent" process, but I believe the two are probably unrelated. Can anyone confirm or deny?

I am using Mavericks, the App Store preferences are set to automatically check for udates, but NOT to download or install...

The App Store application shows two updates available, namely system software (itunes& printer software) and an iMovie update. Via little snitch, I can see the storeagent process chewing up a considerable amount of bandwidth.... downloading what, I have no idea! this morning it has used almost 0.6Gb and is still going strong.

UPDATE: OK, just had a look at the App Store application again, verified that I had NOT clicked any of the update buttons. I then clicked the update button for the iMovie update and to my surprise the progress bar in App Store application shows that 600Mb of this update has already been downloaded! Not only that, now that I have proactively requested the iMovie update, activity under the storeagent process has not changed - ie it has been downloading all the time. I am pretty sure of this because if I now choose to pause the iMovie update, the storeagent process stops using up bandwidth.

My conclusion is that there is a bug in the App Store preferences which allows background downloads, in spite of the fact that "download newly available updates in the background" is NOT selected. It is odd that in my case only the iMovie update seems to get around this, whereas the itunes and printer software updates seem to be correctly prevented from running on the background.

Not sure if this will help anybody but like posters here Ive been trying to track down what is being downloaded by storeagent. I finally found that there is a setting in itunes to do with automatic downloads of music and apps bought on other devices. Turning the auto download off for that seemed to stop my mystery downloading. Why this feature has suddenly become attentive I have no idea !! Though I did have some problem with my account on appstore recently and they did do something to sort that out, but they refused to tell me what the problem was !

You nailed it on the head James.. I also have a pending iMovie update which I had not yet initiated, and after "starting" it I see it's already downloaded over 1GB of the 2GB update. I'm filing a radar describing the issue (rdar://15939245).