Mail consuming excessive processor power

Question

Level 1

15 points

Mail consuming excessive processor power

In the last day or two, Mail is consuming between 60-85% of CPU power according to activity monitor, causing the processor to run hot and the fan to cycle up to high. Mail has crashed a couple of times, too. I recently moved a lot of old messages to archives and synchronized all accounts.

I am currently running two accounts on Mail, iCloud and my work Exchange account. My system admin at work reports no problems with the Exchange server.

Any help is appreciated!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Jul 17, 2013 2:04 PM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,045 points

Jul 17, 2013 2:30 PM in response to Hearn Cho1

Try a restart.

Do a backup, using either Time Machine or a cloning program, to ensure files/data can be recovered. Two backups are better than one.

Try setting up another admin user account to see if the same problem continues. If Back-to-My Mac is selected in System Preferences, the Guest account will not work. The intent is to see if it is specific to one account or a system wide problem. This account can be deleted later.

Isolating an issue by using another user account

If the problem is still there, try booting into the Safe Mode. Shut down the computer and then power it back up. Immediately after hearing the startup chime, hold down the shift key and continue to hold it until the gray Apple icon and a progress bar appear. The boot up is significantly slower than normal. This will reset some caches, forces a directory check, and disables all startup and login items, among other things. When you reboot normally, the initial reboot may be slower than normal. If the system operates normally, there may be 3rd party applications which are causing a problem. Try deleting/disabling the third party applications after a restart by using the application uninstaller. For each disable/delete, you will need to restart if you don't do them all at once.

Safe Mode

Safe Mode - About

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Answer 2

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jul 18, 2013 12:20 AM in response to Hearn Cho1

Launch the Console 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 Console in the icon grid.

Step 1

Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

Enter the name of the crashed application or process in the Filter text field. Select the messages from the time of the last crash, if any. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).

When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Step 2

Still in the Console window, look under User Diagnostic Reports for crash reports related to the process. The report name starts with the name of the crashed process, and ends with ".crash". Select the most recent report and post the entire contents — again, the text, not a screenshot. In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.) Please don’t post shutdownStall, spin, or hang logs — they're very long and not helpful.

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Answer 3

Hearn Cho1 Author

Level 1

15 points

Jul 18, 2013 7:27 AM in response to Linc Davis

re: step 1 Console log did not go back to previous crash, but these are the messages that cam up fo the last episode when Mail was consuming a ton of CPU power:

7/17/13 4:46:11.928 PM Mail[321]: Error in CGSAddTrackingRect (1000)

7/17/13 4:46:11.928 PM Mail[321]: CGSSetTrackingAreaOption returned CG error 1001

7/17/13 4:46:11.993 PM Mail[321]: CGSAddTrackingRect: Region creation failure

Those three lines repeated a couple hundred times on Console and coincided with the last spin up.

re: step 2 - there was no crash log for Mail, I may have forced quit when the application was spun up and stopped responding. It may not have been actual crashes.

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Answer 4

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jul 18, 2013 8:34 AM in response to Hearn Cho1

Back up all data.

Triple-click the line below on this page to select it:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mail/Cache.db

Right-click or control -click the highlighted line and select

Services ▹ Reveal

from the contextual menu.* A folder should open with an item selected. Quit the application if it's running. Move the selected item to the Trash. Relaunch the application and test.

*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C). In the Finder, select

Go ▹ Go to Folder...

from the menu bar, paste into the box that opens (command-V). You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.

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Answer 5

Aug 13, 2013 8:48 AM in response to Linc Davis

Has this issue been resolved? I'm having the same error and problem and would be interested to learn more.

Linc Davis... if it helps, here are the lines from Console before, during, and after deleting the cache.db file in com.apple.mail folder. Mail is now working well at CPU% < 1% at idle and jumping up to 38% to fetch a new mail message. This CPU% problem happens often. Is there a way to resolve the issue or will this process of closing Mail and deleting the cache.db file have to be repeated regularly?

Thanks,

parasbuy22

8/13/13 11:14:57.655 AM Mail[158]: Error in CGSAddTrackingRect (1000)

8/13/13 11:14:57.655 AM Mail[158]: CGSSetTrackingAreaOption returned CG error 1001

8/13/13 11:16:40.196 AM Mail[158]: CGSAddTrackingRect: Region creation failure

8/13/13 11:16:40.196 AM Mail[158]: Error in CGSAddTrackingRect (1000)

8/13/13 11:16:40.197 AM Mail[158]: CGSSetTrackingAreaOption returned CG error 1001

8/13/13 11:23:11.575 AM Mail[158]: Unable to simultaneously satisfy constraints:

(

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e3d9d780 h=-&- v=-&- V:|-(0)-[WebClipView:0x7ff1e1d65700] (Names: '|':WebDynamicScrollBarsView:0x7ff1e1d41080 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e1dd3820 h=-&- v=-&- V:|-(0)-[WebDynamicScrollBarsView:0x7ff1e1d41080] (Names: '|':WebFrameView:0x7ff1e1db9520 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e3d4cc80 h=-&- v=-&- V:|-(20)-[WebFrameView:0x7ff1e1db9520] (Names: '|':MessageWebView:0x7ff1e1d5fe20 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e376eef0 h=-&- v=-&- V:[WebFrameView:0x7ff1e1db9520]-(0)-| (Names: '|':MessageWebView:0x7ff1e1d5fe20 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e39f4ae0 h=-&- v=-&- V:[WebDynamicScrollBarsView:0x7ff1e1d41080]-(0)-| (Names: '|':WebFrameView:0x7ff1e1db9520 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1dbad0c30 h=-&- v=-&- V:[WebClipView:0x7ff1e1d65700]-(0)-| (Names: '|':WebDynamicScrollBarsView:0x7ff1e1d41080 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e3d8b700 h=-&- v=-&- V:[MessageWebView:0x7ff1e1d5fe20]-(0)-| (Names: '|':_MailNSClipView:0x7ff1e9b2e740 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e3dd7fb0 h=-&- v=-&- V:|-(20)-[MessageWebView:0x7ff1e1d5fe20] (Names: '|':_MailNSClipView:0x7ff1e9b2e740 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e1d09d10 h=-&- v=-&- V:|-(0)-[_MailNSClipView:0x7ff1e9b2e740] (Names: '|':MessageBodyScrollView:0x7ff1e9b38520 )>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e49b23a0 h=--& v=--& V:[MessageBodyScrollView:0x7ff1e9b38520(20)]>",

"<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1e1d06180 h=-&- v=-&- V:[_MailNSClipView:0x7ff1e9b2e740]-(0)-| (Names: '|':MessageBodyScrollView:0x7ff1e9b38520 )>"

)

Will attempt to recover by breaking constraint

<NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x7ff1dbad0c30 h=-&- v=-&- V:[WebClipView:0x7ff1e1d65700]-(0)-| (Names: '|':WebDynamicScrollBarsView:0x7ff1e1d41080 )>

Set the NSUserDefault NSConstraintBasedLayoutVisualizeMutuallyExclusiveConstraints to YES to have -[NSWindow visualizeConstraints:] automatically called when this happens. And/or, break on objc_exception_throw to catch this in the debugger.

8/13/13 11:23:11.576 AM Mail[158]: Unable to simultaneously satisfy constraints: