installd took 130% of CPU and sent temperatures through the roof. Why?

The original reason the guy created cputhrottle was because of the rise in temp on his MBP. I've already used it with great success. Check it out.

Totally agree. Shouldn't be maxing CPU for such a unimportant background task.

"installd" runs while installing updates and apps. Today, all of the sudden, I heared the fans going up while I was doing nothing intense. I saw installd and it was hogging CPU cycles. It disappeared as soon as the update finished installing.

This issue is occuring for me as well. My computer became quite slow, and when I open "Activity Monitor" I noticed that installd is taking up a lot of cycles.

However, as far as I know nothing is being updated.

I open the "App Store" app, and go to the update section, and I see four items that can be updated.

So I click on the Update item for two apps.

However, these two apps then change to the "waiting" state rather than "downloading" state.

So whatever installd is currently installing on my computer in the background, it is blocking the download and installation in my App Store.

Apple, can you please explain this? Is it a virus database update? whitelist? virus scan?

Can it be less aggressive?

"installd" is just the background process for the "Software Update" GUI application. If you open the Software Update application and check for updates, take a look at the Activity Monitor--you'll see the "installd" process doing a bunch of work.

The reason it pegs your CPU is because it must compile the current list of software installed on your computer, and compare with the current version list recieved from Apple's servers.

You can set the frequency of Software Update checks in System Preferences > Software Update.

The default settings are to both "Check for updates" AND "Download updates automatically".

You may adjust either setting, but I would not recommend turning it of alltogether.

There's nothing nefarious about this process--it's just set to download updates (which explains the WIFI going nuts).

To all users experiencing this issue, you might want to check out a tool like Little Snitch. It allows you to define rules for all programs that want to access the internet. Since installd seems to check for software on it's own and run in the background, you should be able to use it to block installd from looking for updates.

It seems from my experience that even though I have software update checking disabled, the software updates prompt shows up anyway from time to time, probably triggered by other applications like iTunes being launched.

I have not had the pleasure of blocking this program's access to the internet yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I don't know if this will even solve the issue, but since others have been having a problem with out of control computers, I thought others might find a tool like this useful. I hate being slowed down because some developer or corporate goon thinks they can use my computer without my permission.

Best of luck!

Confirming the issue persists on Mac OS X 10.8.2 on MacBook Pro Retina today.

I noticed the slowness, then checked temps - CPU was at 60, GPU Duode was at 71.

Then started looking on the discussions here about it and while I was revewing this very thread and read abiut the background downloading and installaition, App Store poped-up with 3 updates.

One of them was big: Xcode (I am develper as well so I do have it). And I did notice before that when Xcode is updated , the MacBook becomes slow and very hot. But I have not started the update yet ...

Funny, by the way, since one of my original posts here was exactly for the same issue - but on a PC, when new version of iTunes is getting downloaded. A whole 6 (six!) years ago: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/702488

Absolutely no idea why a download would need to take all CPU - no other OS does it.

I was hit by Xcode update too. The cpu went up to 400%, my MacBook Air turned into a vacuum cleaner and I had to take my shirt off.

I logged about 5471709 file operations (with sudo fs_usage -f filesys) during the installd run.

Obviously to see if some software needs a update the Mountain Lion is doing quite a thorough job.

It would really be great if operating system could run those bulk operations in slightly less hurry. And an indicator with option to pause / cancel the operation would be welcome too.

-Pete

This is de interface and protocol defined into "intalld" executable:

#pragma mark -

/*

* File: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PackageKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ins talld

* UUID: 2D412B3E-F18C-3A69-AF67-6203D319564F

* Arch: Intel x86-64 (x86_64)

* Minimum Mac OS X version: 10.8.0

*

* Objective-C Garbage Collection: Unsupported

*/

@protocol PKInstallDaemon

- (void)startPurgeOfSandboxesOnVolume:(id)arg1 untilFreeSpaceAvailable:(unsigned long long)arg2;

- (unsigned long long)estimateOfPurgeableSpaceForSandboxesOnVolume:(id)arg1;

- (BOOL)isCurrentlyStagedInstallRequest:(bycopy id)arg1 purgeableSize:(id *)arg2;

- (BOOL)registerAuthorizationFromInstallRequest:(bycopy id)arg1;

- (bycopy id)tokenForCurrentCommitIgnoringBlockingClients:(BOOL)arg1;

- (bycopy id)registrationPathsForToken:(id)arg1;

- (bycopy id)installErrorForToken:(id)arg1;

- (bycopy id)displayNamesForToken:(id)arg1;

- (bycopy id)installStatusForToken:(id)arg1;

- (void)addToken:(id)arg1;

- (id)tokenWithInstallRequest:(bycopy id)arg1 error:(id *)arg2;

@end

@interface PKInstallDaemon (Server)

- (void)shutDown;

- (BOOL)connection:(id)arg1 handleRequest:(id)arg2;

- (void)clientConnectionDidDie:(id)arg1;

- (BOOL)connection:(id)arg1 shouldMakeNewConnection:(id)arg2;

- (void)runWithTimeout:(double)arg1;

- (id)_initAsLaunchDaemon:(id)arg1;

@end

----------------

Maybe this can give us an idea of the end of the program!

We can see 2 interesting methods

- (void)startPurgeOfSandboxesOnVolume:(id)arg1 untilFreeSpaceAvailable:(unsigned long long)arg2;

- (unsigned long long)estimateOfPurgeableSpaceForSandboxesOnVolume:(id)arg1;

This can explain why so many file operations are done while the process is about 100% CPU!

Ok! with this, i understand that one of the target of this program is free disk space!

Can some employer of Apple confirm this??

Perhaps one param to configure CPU level ocupation, can resolve this stages! for example, one param into the next property file:

"/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.installd.user.plist"

Some solution???

Thanks!

I just did that, thanks for the post.

I noticed while installd was sucking up CPU cycles, the biggest impact on my MacBook Pro was the IO wait that it was causing. After I killed installd, like magic the IO read/writes and IO wait fell to almost zero. Unless I open an app of course, but that's normal.

I highly recommend following Valor's suggestion and turn off automatic updates. Realistically, you only need to check for updates once a month or so. Unless there's a critical security update, but you could always subscribe to that RSS feed to keep yourself informed.

Bad installd, bad... down boy.

I have been running the same macbook pro (core i7 with 8GB) for about 2 years and have today, for the first time, experienced this installd process consuming copious amounts of CPU resources. (270%). Perhaps coincidentally, I replaced my standard HDD with an OGZ 6G SSD yesterday. I am wondering if the rapid response from a 6G SSD has removed a limiting factor that was holding the installd process at bay previously - the installd may have been waiting and idling while the HDD did its writes, but with the SSD writes dramatically faster and the installd process has no artificial caps on how much of the CPU resource it should consume. However, the nice number for the installd process is 0 by default so it should be willing to share easily with other processes that want to use the processor, meaning that this really isn't a problem.

To see the nice number of installd, you can run this command:

ps ax1 -l | grep installd

the nice number is in the 7th column (you wont' see the column header because the grep command won't find "installd" in that line).

If you find that it is interfering with your more important processes, you can change the niceness of installd using the nice command. You will want to increase it to a larger number, making it more "nice" by giving it a lower priority for CPU access.

I am wondering if other posters on this thread are also using SSDs. Is anyone experiencing this issue on a system with an HDD?

Interesting. That might explain why often the fan goes up despite the fact that CPU is shown to be "at normal level". I might have to consult "top" from the command line instead...