AppleSpell.service running 100% of CPU and overheating

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Level 1

52 points

AppleSpell.service running 100% of CPU and overheating

Hi, I have a 15'' MBP retina 2.6ghz running 10.8.2. For the past 24 hours, the CPU temperatures on my machine were running around 170-195 degress F. According to the Activity Monitor, a process called AppleSpell.service was at 101% of CPU. Once I quit, the temperatures dropped and battery life jumped. Two questions:

1) Probably being paranoid, but would there have been any damage to hardware after running at 185 degrees for a full day?

2) I've had this machine for a month and it wasn't a problem before. The only thing that changed on my machine over the last 24 hours was installing iTunes 11. Could this have triggered something faulty with AppleSpell.service?

Thanks

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Dec 1, 2012 12:04 PM

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Answer 1

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,329 points

Dec 1, 2012 12:14 PM in response to jszrules

Your MBP ad heat sensors that will shut it down if it exceeds dangerous levels so that it will not commit Hari Kari. The threshold I believe is 105c.

The download of an iTunes upgrade should have no affect on other software.

You may find these articles informative:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1473

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1778

Ciao.

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Answer 2

jszrules Author

Level 1

52 points

Dec 1, 2012 12:53 PM in response to OGELTHORPE

Thank you OGELTHORPE. This was helpful. Is there a way to identify what triggers AppleSpell.service to become a "runaway" ?

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Answer 3

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,329 points

Dec 1, 2012 1:12 PM in response to jszrules

Not that I am aware of. I have experienced 'runaway applications' on occasions but I have never bee able to determine any cause and effect. One might think that there should be. When that happens I just open ACTIVITY MONITOR and shut the process down. Fortunately this does not happen often.

Sorry I cannot give you a definitive answer for your question but perhaps some one will read this post and educate both of us.

Ciao.

Perhaps looking at CONSOLE might give the answer, but I have never done that when this phenomenon has occurred. (This thought just came to mind.)

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Answer 4

schpanky

Level 1

4 points

Sep 7, 2015 9:53 PM in response to OGELTHORPE

Today I had an issue (the first) with AppleSpell using unreasonable processor time. It was initially caused by opening a particularly large (700MB) text file in TextEdit, then doing a search (which took ages). Following that, typing became very slow to respond in Mail.app (and others).

I killed AppleSpell using the killall command, however the process re-spawned with 100% processor usage (on one of the cores).
I quite TextEdit, then killed it again, but it respawned once more.

In SystemPrefs > Keyboard > Text, there's an option to enable/disable "Correct Spelling Automatically". This was already disabled, but I enabled it then disabled it. This seemed to break the AppleSpell curse and processor usage went back to normal.
Note while in that same settings window, I selected 'Australian English" as the preferred language; it had previously been set to "Automatic by Language".

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