I do have the very same problem on my Macbook Unibody 2009. Have you done what you suggested? Did it manage somehow to avoid the problem? For what I have understood the process seems to be related to the help documentation. Since the first Install of Lion is more and more rare on my machine, but it still appears quite often reaching on average 600 MB. I've sent feedback to Apple, but I don't know if any anser/solution is going to come. I posted also on macrumors forums and few people reported it.
Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Have the same issue here guys, on a MacBook Air Late 2008. The helpd process heats up erratically my machine like ****, reaching 100% of the CPU as reported by Monitor.
I've the same hungry helpd process. It takes about 1Gb ram and system become unusable until I kill the process manually. Although it disappears after 10-15 minutes, but some time later it appears again. May be some daemon from unsupported application makes this process wrong?
Actually it is the daemon for the Help pages. My temporary solution is to deactivate it using the Lingon utility. But I also think that some unsupported application makes it stuck somewhere. The debug is hard, having so many applications...
helpd is crashing many times per day for me. I'm on Lion.
helpd is also causing issues here, I'm also noticing (using little snitch) that it is constantly connecting to help.apple.com and at one point it initiated a connection to intuit.com and I didn't have any intuit software running, (infact I haven't since last tax season.)
I'm also seeing problems on accounts that have parental controls enabled with the webproxyd process, it will "randomly" decide to block all wab traffic for that user even if they have unrestricted web access. We have a script setup to kill & restart the process that users can run, and that seems to be getting them by for now but really is not an ideal solution.
Same issue here on a White Macbook (Late 2009). I kill it manually and it won't come back again. But it usually shows up a few minutes after logging into any user account.
It seems it's not a frequent issue.
I filled a bug report (hope you also did that), and after some communication with the engeneering team, I wait for an answer (or a solution).
I see in the Console a lot of messages regarding language:
- 2011-09-05 23:50:39.160 hiutil[26759:8a03] Language ro_RO is not directly supported by SDM, but attempting to use anyway!
- 2011-09-05 23:50:39.162 hiutil[26759:8a03] No stopwords available for ro_RO
Do you have something like that?
I followed advice above, used lingon and deleted some apps I wasn't using anymore.
THe problem went away, before 10.7.1 (and hasn't come back).
In Lingon I have it set to run on Sundays at midnight and to run if /Applications/ is modified, although I did disable it for a while.
I add my voice to the helpd issue under 10.7.1 on white MacBook 2008. I don't get where that problem comes from. I guess I'm going to use Lingon and hopefully the problem will be fixed by 10.7.2
Anybody knows how to setup Lingon to achieve this?: " Actually it is the daemon for the Help pages. My temporary solution is to deactivate it using the Lingon utility."
Thanks.
I did the following :
- launch Lingon
- then unroll the list of System Agents clicing on "Show" (it appears next to System Agents when you hover on it...)
- the look for com.apple.helpd
- say yes to the dialog window
- uncheck the Enable box
I did it this way. Some terminal option exists too, which is free. To tell the whole story, I have also upgraded my RAM to 4 Gigas. The processes has appeared some other times, but now it has stopped. I think yhere is some relationship with existing applications and their help pages. Some also refer to some languages incompatibility.
I have to say i didn't make a fresh install of Lion and that on Snow Leopard I had used CleanMyMac to take some unused languages off.... are we all upgrading people or there is someone with a fresh install too?
I guess I don't get how to do it in Lingon 3, because there's no Enable box in the dialog...
I have 4 Gigs RAM, deleted some old startup /Application support items here and there, restarted, did a PRAM reset, repaired permissions... Well helpd launched only once since then. In the console I see a lot around Adobe, AIR, and a couple of other things. Adobe has put files everywhere in years, crazy. Let's see if that helpd issue happens again then.
Same here, upgrade from Snow, and usedf CleanMyMac to get rid of unused languages.
8 GB RAM.
I'm also noticing a service (deamon) called: imagent (launching from /System/Library/privateFrameworks/IMCore.framework/imagent.app)
that is constanty running and making internet connections (to Apple and google mostly) even when I have no I.M programs running (such as iChat, Facetime, Adium, etc...)
it also seems to hit a CPU spike now and then, and is of course consuming some memory.
com.apple.helpd ( helpd ) - 1MB to 1GB ram Usage