Ok then, here is the refresher on where we're at:
- com.apple.geod is malfunctioning. It is NOT a problem with any one other particular app.
- At this time there is nothing you can do to fix the issue with this particular process locking up.
- The only solution here is actually a workaround to stop the process from starting at all.
None of my instructions based on my private research will fix this issue. They will however prevent the entire process from starting, and if it doesn't start up, there is no way that it can eat memory and cause problems. If you're having problems with Safari triggering this process, that would be because you went to at least one website that requested your location and you granted it permission. Go to Settings/Notifications, and then start denying everything and don't allow any more sites access.
Also, I would HIGHLY recommend launching and installing Ghostery to start blocking ads and tracking cookies. You won't believe how much faster your browser runs.
In reality, there are two massive problems at work here. The first one is the fact that com.apple.geod is malfunctioning in itself. It supposed to be a process that sits in the background and just waits to be called upon to query iOS devices for GPS data. Instead it just locks up, and worse yet has a massive, MASSIVE memory leak issue where it just eats up more and more available memory, or RAM.
The second problem here is since iOS came out, Apple decided to port the Save Application State feature of iOS over into OS X. What does that mean? In layman's terms, whenever you start up an application, it loads itself into memory. Sometimes, especially with very bulky apps like MS Office, or Adobe Suite, you'll see there are also other processes to start up. Once the app is fully loaded, it then opens up the individual files. So if let's say for example you double-click on a spreadsheet and open it up with Excel or Numbers. The initial loading period for the app takes a little time until the file itself is open. But lets say you then close the file, BUT leave the application open and do NOT quit out of it. Double-click on that same spreadsheet, or any other file, and you'll notice that the app loads instantaneously. Why? Because the software application is already running and doesn't need to unpackage and load itself into memory because it's already there. And then normally once you quit out of the process, ideally it's supposed to unload itself, and abandons the sectors in memory to be freed up for use by other applications/processes.
Apparently Apple thought it was a good idea to "Save" these memory states. So lets say for instance you open up these apps and we go through the same loading process. Now when you quit out of them, what happens is the OS reads the data that is in each memory sector and then writes it to a file. So then the next time you call up that application to start up, instead of loading the whole thing back into memory, it just reads that file and writes the data contained inside back into the Memory. The application appears to start up faster, but in reality it's merely resuming it's last operating state. It's like it never even quit, because in reality it never did. In OS X this happens when you quit out of an app. In iOS it happens when you hit the Home button.
Now the good side to this is that we have applications that start even faster. Yay. This is particularly important on mobile devices as not only do items load faster, but the CPU is utilized less meaning longer battery life.
The bad side is that if you have an app that has a nasty software bug, restarting and/or rebooting will NEVER EVER resolve the issue. Apple knows this is an occasional problem as per this KB article:
Force an app to close in iOS - Apple Support
Whenever you're "force closing" an app, what you're doing is erasing it's Saved Application State and forcing it to start over. and reload. Try it. Close out your apps, and notice how much longer they take to open. Then when you don't "Force Quit" them, you'll see they start almost instantaneously.
OS X compounds this issue because there is NO easy way to erase the SAS. In OS X you have to manually delete the file by navigating to:
Macintosh HD/Users/~/Library/Saved Application State.
At best we end up with applications that run slow as all get out. At worst is what we see with com.apple.geod. The app just sits there in the background, never suspends itself, just ceases responding until it's called on again. And it has a memory leak. So what happens is what I had where it had been sitting there for MONTHS and wound-up consuming 2.8GB of memory! That forced my iMac to resort to the internal swapfile on the Hard Drive, which is much slower, so the whole thing slowed to a crawl. Can't reboot to fix it because the Saved Application State file just loads back into memory and the whole thing perpetuates itself even further.
I'm submitting a feedback report on this too, but it's not anything I'm going to abandon OS X let alone the entire Apple ecosystem for. I'm sure it'll be fixed, and it's just not worth the expense let alone security risk of switching to another platform.
