OCSP Service using up quite a bit of bandwidth

I think mine takes the cake. I didn't realize what was happening until Comcast started capping monthly data usage at 1024 Gb per month. I got a notice on day 6 that I exceeded the monthly usage! I turned off OCSP and CRL in keychain access. everything seems to be fine now.

this is data usage reported in my router. i factory reset it recently so I couldn't go back very far.

monthly data usage according to comcast.

Drew Reece wrote:

Elrainia wrote:

I still can't believe there isn't more fuss about this. I've looked at a number of Macs belonging to other people and they're all doing it (needless to say the owners are all slightly appalled!). The only machine that I've not seen it on is my MBP which was the first machine I upgraded to Mavericks (not that that makes any difference!).

The Apple apologists on here say about 320 million people have 10.9 installed. If that is true this is probably an issue that only appears if you bother to monitor data usage (or have a data cap & notice the excessive usage etc).

There is a chance that it's a certain set of conditions that cause it too (such as certain combinations of migrated settings). I think the best we can hope for is enough people submit bug reports & it gets the attention of Apple.

It may be worth downloading the developer releases & seeing if they resolve the issue, Apple may be more likly bugfix if it is caught during the beta stage (just don't post details here because of the NDA).

I only noticed it becuse I had a number of large downloads that month (including 10.9 itself) and my ISP sent a warning email about my data cap. Since the problem appears to be a seven second timeout on the client side I can't see how it would be difficult to fix.

BQ.

The oscpd daemon has a manual page ('man ocspd' in Terminal) or…

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man1/ocspd.1.html

I would disable iCloud on one Mac & see if it has any effect, then re-enable slowly to see which task causes it. Reboot between each test. The daemon is launched 'on demand' so it might be any task that uses SSL or the security framework that forces the update.

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ocspd.plist

It may be worth checking logs for ocspd messages (Apps/Utilities/Console), incase it is having trouble saving caches.

The usual boot to recovery mode, run disk repair & permissions repair tasks might help? 🙂

I guess you could look at the certificates in Keychain Access, but I don't know where to start in cleaning them up, sorry.

Hi

I am having the same problem with my copy of marvericks. I am seeing about 2gig per day going to ocspd. I am on limited downloads so this is becoming a big problem for me. I even had a day where I lost 8 gig but the usual amount is 2. I have taken to disconnecting my Mac when I am not using it 8-(.

I have turned off AppStore and iCloud to try an isolate but I will have to try Drew's suggestions.

Good luck

/var/db/crls

Go ▹ Go to Folder...

Hi Linc

I have tried that previously with no success.

I do have a lot of certificates that I probably don't need so might try deleting some to see if that effects the download volume.

Thanks

Acutally I found this related problem

http://www.ellenburg.org/index.php/2013/10/23/osx-10-9-mavericks-appstore-issues /

which suggests:

"So it turns out the problem is Apple is having problems with their online OCSP & CRL servers for their certificates.

Turning off CRL & OCSP checking in the Certificates Preferences in Keychain Access solved the problem."

It seems to be working for me! (until the next update)

Clockworkapps, THANK YOU for finding this and posting it. I have also had this issue. I am on a satellite ISP and I was using over a gig a day. My 15 was not going to last very long! Also I had no idea where the data was going--I wasn't doing anything different from the last 11 months and I had never gone over my limit before. I suspected iOS7 upgrade, which might also have been using a lot of data, but this fix on my Mac did the trick.

I want to URGE Apple to fix this because I do not like having these items turned off--not good for safe surfing. How will we know if we can turn them back on?

I would have never looked at this or known to turn off the CRL and OCSP. Thanks for posting. I have also posted this fix on my satellite ISP's forum. They didn't know how to fix this when I called them.

I have the same problem, and it is near 3.5 GB per day. I just turned off OCSP, I will check if it helps.

Brilliant - I would never have found this - I have Rubernet monitoring everything and Little Snitch locking everything down and still saw large amounts of my precious Satellite bandwidth being eaten up even with only "essential Apple services" running - and it looks like ocspd was most of it.

This has saved the day for me! I had a couple days on which ocspd used upwards of 35GB! As a result I blew through my 200GB cap for last month. I only wish I had found the cause and solution sooner.

Thanks again!

Thanks for the suggestions.

I foolishly installed Mavericks on a Mini server and went on holiday for 10 days shortly after, came back to over-quota messages from my ISP. The increase in usage for me started around the 7th Nov, but I installed Mavericks on the 25th October, so not 100% certain Mavericks is the cause. Also, when I look at Purchases in App Store Mavericks says "Download" rather than "Installed" (which it says for everything else). Anyone else get that? Perhaps the upgrade didn't complete properly, although the machine says it's running 10.9.

Deleting the contents of /var/db/crls reduced my daily ocspd consumption from up to 8GB to around 1GB.

Turning off iCloud sync of Keychain and a few other things dropped it to ~100MB a day, so getting better but still uncool on limited quota and bandwidth.

I am loath to turn off checking altogether, but it's looking like that or ditching iCloud next.

Any other ideas?

I'm running an iMac in a single person business off an ethernet connection and also have had a huge increase in data usage. My normal 10GB monthly allowance got sucked out in 14 days last month. [My normal usage is about 100-200MB a day]. It started shortly after Maverics was installed..... 600-800Mb a day then rising to 1200-1500MB a day.

I have made 4-5 calls to Apple and hours of my time and no solution. The last lady suggested that I just unplug my ethernet cable when I go home each night... great problem solver! Recent nights I have quit all applications and yesterday evening signed out of iCloud to eliminate that as a possibility. This all seems to have accellerated the usage to a further ..... 2GB yesterday and now 3.5GB since midnight to noon.

Thanks clockworkapps for the heads up on the OCSP & CRL option. I've found them and turned them off ... hope it works and a beer for you if it does!

Cheers Steve