Folder Action Dispatcher

God bless you!

Ah, god bless the Tim Cook era. Not-ready-for-primetime-Yosemite was causing this to happen on my MacBook also, and this solved the problem for me also.

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.

Sadly today Folder Actions Dispatcher is not responding again in the Activity Monitor. 48 hours was the longest I've seen it run, but my above post was incorrect. Apple still needs to address this 😟

Why isn't Apple fixing this!? It doesn't seem to be a a problem on my 27" iMac, but a troubling issue on my 17" MacBook Pro. Big enough issue to to stop using the product. I've already recommended to a few people to NOT buy a Mac because of it.

I, also, saw the process grow to 20 GB on my 16 GB iMac running Yosemite. Now, I admit that I had not noticed any particular sluggishness with my computer, but I WAS aware of a lot of disk thrashing. I assumed that was Time Machine doing it's thing, but since disabling Folder Actions, I've come to believe that it was a ridiculous amount of swapping into and out of virtual memory.

In my case it was a RoboForm script that had resulted in the enabling of Folder Actions. The name of that script was removeRoboFormHandler.

Does anyone know if this is likely to adversely affect the function of RoboForm? I ask because I cannot discern any difference in RoboForm's performance, but I'd deduce that the script had to be there for some reason.

I also noticed that the script, remove RoboFormHandler was listed in Folder Actions Dispatcher, but there are 2 listings for this script. I'm also curious about what purpose the script serves and why there are 2 listings. I unchecked both, and my system CPU usage went way down.

I had three scripts that were red and said something about "quarantine". I deleted them. I hope that solves my problem. I appreciate the thread, but I don't feel like I knew what I was doing exactly. Hopefully nothing to dangerous.

Every day I try to use my machine and it is frozen because all the memory is being used by that stupid process.

That worked like a charm. Thank you for helping.

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.

Hi,

i also had this problem. In my default settings for Folder Actions Dispatcher was my Mac HDD.

After i removed it, CPU and Memory load was normal. Before CPU and Memory load was very high!

just updated to Yosemite.... have done on other machines without this problem... but now this is killing me..... Folder Actions Dispatcher is hammering machine at 90+% CPU usage no matter what I do...

the odd thing, after reading this thread.... I have NO folder actions set... it's not even turned on... and yet... it's completely taking over my machine... Activity Monitor shows it running 91 - 94 % of CPU... but it's turned OFF everywhere I've looked for it.

HELP!!!!!!! how do I kill this menace????????

hasn't happened on either of my other two machines... both running Yosemite just fine.... have never ever seen this

1) What version of Yosemite are you running?

2) Can you verify how you're checking to see if any folder actions are set? (as far as I know, no one's seen this if they haven't had folder actions turned on, and referencing a specific folder(s)). Also, do you have other accounts on that machine that might have them turned on?

3) As far I can tell, this problem has been fixed with Yosemite 10.10.2. I'll know more on Monday (after I let it run all weekend), but after letting it run a couple of hours I'm not seeing either the CPU or the RAM problem. When I was seeing the problem, it was quite apparent after watching things in the Activity Monitor over the course of a half-hour. I'm not seeing anything like that now.

Thanks...

First, here's a ink to a post on ways to handle this problem: ttp://www.macissues.com/2015/01/30/fix-folder-actions-dispatcher-using-high-cpu- in-yosemite/l

My problem was that I had NO Folder Action Setup... in any contextual menu! That made it extremely hard to follow any of the threads about this problem, since the first step in most of them was "use the Folder Action Setup app to...". 😮 I had looked at the Keyboard Pref Pane->Shortcuts list of possible items yesterday, unfortunately, my frustrations got the better of me. I finally found the item in the 'Files and Folders' group of the above Pref Panel. For reason I can't fathom, it was not checked. I have no idea if that's the default, but it seems unlikely. 😕

Of course, by the time I found the setting, I had already eliminated the 'Dispatch' crashing (at least for the last 5+ hours) by editing the ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.FolderActions.folders.plist There is a 'key' value there named "WatchPaths" with an array (list) of paths to watch. WOW! 😝 All I did was to comment out the last four (of the 14) items and re-save the file. There is one that looks at "Internet Plug-Ins" in my user Library, the other three look at the entire three "Library" directories (user, /System/Library, and /Library). I will slowly UN-comment those, one at a time, when I have the time.

In addition, I completely removed all the Services items in ~/Library/Services/ since none of them were particularly useful or used by apps I use often.

Of course, since I made two completely different changes, I'll not know which (or IF) made things improve.

I have "Folder Action Dispatcher" CPU full load problems, try to another guide, but no luck can't fix.😟