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Keychain consuming over 200 GB memory on my iMac. How do I get this memory back?

I realized that I was rapidly losing memory so I used DaisyDisk to scan the hard drive and it shows that over 200 GB are being taken up by the Keychain. When I scanned the hard drive and keychain for mal-ware/spy bots/viruses, it shows nothing.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Feb 4, 2013 10:26 AM

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9 replies

Feb 4, 2013 10:36 AM in response to LPBoni

Someone else here had issues around something similar lately.


In the ~/Library/Keychains directory there were a bunch of files like login.keychain.sb.LOTSOFEXTRASTUFF


The ones with all the weird stuff appeneded (sb.etc) were superfluous and can be deleted. However if you delete the login.keychain file itself, IT WILL BE BAD because all your saved passwords will be lost forever.


I've no idea how the system got in this state in the first place. Likely there's a similar date on all of them?

Feb 4, 2013 11:03 AM in response to William Lloyd

Thank you for the response.


In the ~ /Library/Keychains directory I do NOT see login.keychain as I was expecting to. Instead I see:

applepushserviced.keychain

apsd.keychain

FileVaultMaster.cer

FileVaultMaster.keychain

System.keychain

System.keychain-orig


none of these files are large.

Nor, when I go to ~ /Utilities/Keychain Access do I see anything out of the ordinary. But when I scanned the system, it took over 24 hours to scan through thousands and thousands of keychain files, They appear to be hidden and unable to be found via Finder. Unfortunately, I was not able to see a list of them to see if there are dates on them.

Feb 4, 2013 11:10 AM in response to LPBoni

You are looking in the /Library/Keychains directory (at the root of your hard drive). You're not looking in the Keychains directory in your home folder, which is hidden by default.


Do this:


1) In finder, choose Go->Go to Folder (shortcut is command-shift-G)

2) Paste this into the window: ~/Library/Keychains


That will open your ~/Library/Keychains folder, where you may see scads of extra files.

Feb 4, 2013 11:30 AM in response to LPBoni

950 MB of space?!


That's really, really bad. You're going to have problems as you should ALWAYS have a fair bit more free space than RAM in the machine. Anything under 20 GB of free space is extremely bad, and in fact I'd recommend always keeping a full 1/3 of the drive empty for reasonable performance.


So I don't know. You're machines going to be slow and may crash.


Honestly, I'd probably clean the files up using the terminal, but I'm leery of providing guidance that could cause serious damage in the wrong hands :-(

Feb 4, 2013 3:34 PM in response to LPBoni

Back up all data.


Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it:


find ~/L*/Key* -name *keychain.sb-* -delete


Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).


Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:


☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)


☞ In the Finder, select Go Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.


☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.


Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).


The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear. You can then quit Terminal.

Mar 12, 2013 8:53 PM in response to Linc Davis

This solved my problem. Twice. Both times it happened under my wife's user. I think the first time it happened was around the time I installed 10.8, then it happened the same day I cleared out the keychain.sb files the first time. Any idea why this happens? I'd love to keep it from happening again. I'm running 10.8.2.


- RB

Keychain consuming over 200 GB memory on my iMac. How do I get this memory back?

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