Folder Action Dispatcher

Right click on the file and select Services from the menu then Folder Actions Setup

This will open

Check to see which (if any) folders have actions. If you didn;t turn it on intntionally disable it.

Just chiming in to report the same issue. On my 2013 MBP running OS X 10.10.1, the folder actions dispatcher grew to nearly 60GB.

Thanks for everyone's help in determining the culprit and how to resolve this until this bug is fixed.

in reply to schwerd and Hen3ry:

Two files in your user Library to check. Note the differences in the two names:

1. ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.FolderActions.folders.plist
2. ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.FolderActions.plist

The first one will have a list of file paths to where anything with a Folder Action may be. If there are any items between the "WatchPaths" and "" the System will still try to run Folder Action Dispatcher, and, most likely will crash or at least consume vast amounts of cpu cycles.

The second plist will indicate the true status of of Folder Actions being enabled or not. Just after the 'key' "folderActionsEnabled" will be a Boolean value. It could be either 'true' or 'false'. Unless it is 'false', Folder Actions are still enabled, regardless of what Folder Actions Setup says.

A re-install, may correct these files (and whatever caused the 'Dispatcher' problem) or it may not. That is probably the simplest step, though it will be quiet long, of course.

The second method is what I used. First, make a copy of these two files to your Desktop. Second, edit those files. You can edit them with TextEdit if you make sure that you save the changes as a plain text file (.txt). If it saves the file and leaves the ".plist" extension, you're set to go. If it doesn't, just change the 'txt' to 'plist' and click OK when the System asks if that's really what you want to do. Lastly, drag these two, edited, files back to the appropriate folder. You may want to log out and back in to be sure the OS 'sees' the changes you made. Hope that helps!

GREAT! 😎 🙂

! did a similar 'inspection' routine on another Mac (a mini that I had used, sparingly, with the ßetas) and found the pristine files as a guide.

There are two profound lessons from these exercises:

1. Milages do, indeed, vary!
2. Always have a spare Mac running the same OS! $$$!

Just hope everyone can find a solution that works! Better yet, Apple figures out what the problem is and fixes it. There are several thread here and many posters are really upset.

Fortunately, the two plists I mentioned are the old, XML type. Several others I 'played' with required Xcode, since they are the newer compiled type. I didn't want to mention the need for editing those files as most people don't have/want/need Xcode.

Thanks Frank- was finally able to shut it down thanks to you. I now have my machine back!!!

Thank you so much.

After upgrade to yosemite beta, I encountered similar problem which 1-2 folder actions dispatcher keep running in the background and these processes keep draining the RAM. Your reply helped me to solve the problem.

This certainly works but not knowing all the nuances I had to resort to unchecking "Enable Folder Actions". It stopped my memory drain. But "LaunchAgents" and "LaunchDaemons" were each listed three times in "Folders with Actions" and still checked on. Is this a problem?

I had the same problem, with the same solution. That is, I had several locations of .../LaunchAgents and .../LaunchDaemons in my folder actions list. After letting the system sit for about 6 hours (doing absolutely nothing), the memory usage of Folder Actions Dispatcher grew to 20 GB (yes, GB). This rendered the system pretty much unusable.

After deleting the folder actions and turning off folder actions, everything seems fine.

I've posted a bug with Apple...

I had the same problem. After some experimenting, I discovered that Folder Actions Dispatcher started spinning when I included a "new item alert" for ~/Library/LaunchAgents. If I remove this folder from the list of Folders with Actions, then Folder Actions Dispatcher behaves itself. Currently I have actions set up for LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons in /System/Library and /Library and for /bin. I have no idea why the one particular folder/dir causes the problem behavior. There are only five plist files in there, and none have changed since I upgraded to Yosemite.

Apple needs to fix this. Folder Actions Dispatcher is a useful security watchdog.

After posting a bug with Apple, they asked me to gather some diagnostic information. This allowed me to research it a little further.

It looks like the Folder Actions Dispatcher creates its own set of files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents. One of them - com.apple.FolderActions.folders.plist - seems to constantly get updated (touched) when that folder is in the folders list. This seems to cause a bit of a feedback loop, which causes Folder Actions Dispatcher to chew up virtual RAM in a serious way.

Same goes for me. Every day since I upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite, I was wondering why my iMac w/16 GB RAM would steadily swap. Activity Monitor showed that 'Folder Action Dispatcher' was occupying an obscene 13.5 GB of RAM - and growing.

To make a long story short, under Mavericks, I had written a small script as a folder action that was watching all LaunchAgent folders, in order to save them from manipulation. This was working without a hitch in Mavericks, but not so any more in Yosemite.

After disabling all folder actions, the system was healthy again.

Guess it's a bug, not a feature.

Thanks for you and all the other contributors.

Since I've updated to Yosemite, I've spent my time killing, many times a day, the process Folder Actions Dispatcher through Activity .

With you help, I've done some cleaning and now everything runs well

Thanks Again

After installing Yosemite, my MAC was sitting there spinning. Sometimes it was so slow I couldn't get to the Activity monitor for about 5 minutes. I turned off the folder actions and it's back to normal now.... thanks!!

Thanks to all of you who have contributed to this thread. I had been having issues with my Mac this week and I was losing my mind with it. I finally discovered Folder Actions Dispatcher to be the culprit. Ten minutes of quacking around with DuckDuckGo, and I found this thread and fixed my problem.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this!

While the issue has not been corrected, the fix does work. While most of the people commenting above found disabling Folder Actions to resolve their issue, I use Folder Actions and cannot have it disabled. Even after reading this post a week ago, I came away thinking there still wasn't a fix for me, since I couldn't simply disable Folder Actions. Yesterday, I tried right clicking a folder, choosing Folder Action Setup, and unchecking Enable Folder Actions. As expected, the timed out Folder Action Dispatcher disappeared from my Event Viewer and everything was back to normal, minus my functioning Folder Actions. Then, I went back and re-checked the Enable Folder Actions. Sadly, this locked my entire system up. I was very depressed, until I did a hard shutdown, and upon rebooting, Folder Actions had indeed reenabled, and everything has been running smoothly for over 24 hours. In short, the solution is to disable and then reenable Folder Actions. Hope this helps someone.