softwareupdated process high CPU usage

Question

Level 1

79 points

softwareupdated process high CPU usage

I have a user with a fully updated Mavericks running on a mid-2010 Macbook Pro. She's been complaining of slowness on her system, and checking the Activity Monitor, I'm seeing the softwareupdated process taking up 90 to 115% of the CPU, for about 10 seconds at a time, about every 3 minutes. It shows up, spikes to the top of the Activity Monitor, then disappears again.

She's fully updated, so there's no reason it should be checking so often, and as a precaution I even turned off Software Updates, trying to figure out what the problem could be. That hasn't fixed the problem.

Any ideas on what else I can check or how I can resolve this?

Posted on Jul 7, 2014 1:17 PM

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Answer 1

Brett L

Community Specialist

Jul 9, 2014 9:44 AM in response to plochner

Hi plochner,

It sounds as if you have a user who has processes trying to use a large amount of CPU time causing the MacBook Pro to slow down. As you have seen, you can track CPU usage using Activity Monitor. See this article -

Activity Monitor: View your computer’s processor activity

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5148

You can also look at Activity Monitor to view which processes are using high percentages of CPU time. See this article -

OS X Mavericks: About Activity Monitor

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5890

Select CPU at the top of the Application Monitor window and click the % CPU heading to sort by percentage. Look for the process that is causing the spike at the intervals you are watching for. This may help you find out what is causing the slowness issue.

Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.

Best,

Brett L

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Answer 2

plochner Author

Level 1

79 points

Jul 9, 2014 10:10 AM in response to Brett L

Thanks for the reply, but in my original post I tried to make it clear that we're past that first-tier level of troubleshooting with this particular problem. As stated in the original post, we already have the activity monitor up and sorted by CPU usage. That is how I determined the problem to begin with.

The good news is that the problem seems to have gone away. My guess is that another application on the user's computer, Skype or Adobe Update Manager, or something simliar, was firing up the softwareupdated process way too often, checking for updates. Each check spiked the CPU usage of softwareupdated to over 100%, and it was happening very frequently. I went through her apps and disabled automatic updates for several of them and haven't seen the problem in a couple of days. If it does appear again, I'll do a Sample Process to determine what exactly is starting up that softwareupdated process, so I know what's triggering it.

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Answer 3

jamshid

Level 1

4 points

Jul 21, 2014 10:52 AM in response to plochner

Does the user happen to use Screen Sharing Menulet? I just had same problem, it went away but I noticed my Screen Sharing menulet app was Not Responding, so maybe that was a trigger.

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Answer 4

Jul 23, 2014 9:13 AM in response to jamshid

Thanks for this response. It was MUCH more helpful than the earlier reply.

I had exactly the same situation as plochner and your tip to look for a menulet that was "Not Responding" was spot on. In my case, it was Google Drive.

Found it. Force Quit it. softwareupdated is once again well-behaved.

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Answer 5

misoul

Level 1

9 points

May 5, 2015 8:46 AM in response to Brett L

Brett, you are not doing your job. This is the worst response ever. It shows you didn't even read the question. If this is at retail store, I would ask to speak to your manager.

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Answer 6

Jul 9, 2015 7:30 PM in response to Brett L

Did you even actually read the user's question? Replies such as yours are why the Apple Support Communities absolutely fail in their purpose. I know this is a year old, but it just needed saying.

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Answer 7

Sep 6, 2015 10:52 AM in response to jamshid

I found this post while searching for the same situation I sudden'y had. In my case I had just installed GifGrabber, which is a free utility for making animated GIFs. But after running that, softwareupdated was using about 60% CPU, and my fans were going wild. Quitting it removed the softwareupdated entry, I'm just waiting for the fans to settle down now!

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