com.apple.xpc.launchd & com.apple.mdworker.bundles pollute logs with errors

I am having this trouble too, it seems to be related to a decrease in performance with Yosemite as well, the process is trying to respawn multiple times a second.

I am troubleshooting this, as it happened in the beta as well. It seemed that rebuilding permissions and restarting helped last time. I'll let you know if I figure it out.

After using Disk Utility to rebuild permissions, I restarted. I had to force quit my Macbook Pro (By holding the power button to force the shutdown) after it seemed get stuck shutting down.

After restarting, I canceled the dialog asking me if I wanted to reopen my applications because my computer shutdown because of a problem. And now all seems to be well. No more mdworker message in the logs and mdworker seems to be running (and apparently indexing the drive).

TL;DR I would recommend that you follow this procedure, it helped me:

1. Use Disk Utility to rebuild your disk permissions.
2. Save your work and quit your apps.
3. Restart your Mac. (Force quit if you are still waiting after a couple of minutes)
4. If after the restart Yosemite asks you if you want to reopen your Applications, "Cancel" to prevent your apps from reloading.
5. All should be running normally.

I get the same, but it only starts afer opening SmartReporter app, not before but continues after I close the app. Only rebooting stops it. I don't get it as long as I don't use the SmartReporter app.

It started for me yesterday without using SmartReporter, which appears only to trigger it than cause it. Is there a command or something to disable this or turn the messages off, or better yet, a solution to what's causing these messages?

Yeah! I've found out what it is. I had the same identical annoying message spamming:

Oct 27 13:52:53 FlatMoon com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.bundles): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

Oct 27 13:53:03 FlatMoon com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.bundles[1141]): Could not find uid associated with service: 0: Undefined error: 0 502

Just look at the last number; 502. It is the UID of another user. Which is present in my main partition (I have Lion and Yosemite installed in two partitions because it is an unsupported MacBook2,1. Sorry Apple, it works!! 😝).

So I just created a new user in my Yosemite partition (I may actually need it), which automatically gets UID 502 and the awful spamming disappeared! If you don't have such user you may need to change the ownership of some incriminating files in Terminal with the command:

chown <your username> <file>

you may use the recursive option like in

chown -R <your username > /Users/<your username>

I hope this helps. ^_^

Great, I meant to come back here and say that the solution above didn't keep. For me, it always happens when my machine is waking up. I am trying to figure out what is asking it to run for user 502 so that I can fix it without creating another user. 😀

But that is great feedback. I'll see if I can figure it out, for me a restart fixes the problem until my machine goes to sleep, upon waking the error starts.

Alright, I seem to have solved it without having to create a new user, (but thanks to @Michelasso for the tip!).

I started doing some investigation and found that there were some temp files for mdworker that were in a user 502 folder:

cd /private/var/folders

sudo find . | grep mdworkers

The above command will show you which temp directories have your com.apple.mdworker.bundle file. Mine looked something like this:

./6k/p4bx5l_x0154yj65gvnsl4jw0000gn/T/com.apple.mdworker.bundle

./y8/zdsf987dsf987sdfsd_s977cd_6kg97gs/C/com.apple.mdworker.bundle

./zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n00000b400002s/C/com.apple.mdworker.bundle

I then changed my directory into each folder and did and ls -l and found that in one the whole temp folder belonged to user 502

cd y8

ls -l

drwxr-xr-x 6 502 staff 204 July 27 11:04 zdsf987dsf987sdfsd_s977cd_6kg97gs

I also noted it was old.

So I removed that whole cache:

cd /private/var/folders

sudo rm -rf y8

I then had to restart (because my mac was locked in the respawn loop) and I have put her to sleep and woken her and so far all seems well.

For some reason launchd appears to be trying to spawn from old cache data.

Anyway, please test it out and see if it solves your problem.

Cheers!

Edit: clarification.

I see, Dustmoo.. I thought the issue was caused by having that account with UID 502 in my main partition. So I dug it a bit more using your example. I actually couldn't find any mdworkers directory in /var. So I looked for the files owned by UID 502 (but it could be any other UID. One must check the last number in the error message, the one I underlined in my first post and use it instead of 502 in the following code):

cd /var

sudo find . -user 502 -exec ls -ld {} \;

This has been the output:

drwx------ 5 michele _spotlight 170 Oct 16 19:10 ./folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/0/com.apple.Spotlight/502

drwx------ 2 michele _spotlight 68 Oct 16 19:10 ./folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/0/com.apple.Spotlight/502/0

drwx------ 2 michele _spotlight 68 Oct 16 19:10 ./folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/0/com.apple.Spotlight/502/C

drwx------ 2 michele _spotlight 68 Oct 16 19:10 ./folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/0/com.apple.Spotlight/502/T

(michele is my username for UID 502)

So it was still in the /var/folder directory, but something related to or created by Spotlight one week ago. Not sure how it went there, since this was a fresh installation in that partition. It really looks like junk to me.

Just in case I removed the incriminated directory:

cd /private/var/folders/zz/

# I did some directory listing and other things just to check

sudo rm -r zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000

And rebooted. I can't really say if it changed anything because I had already made the new account, but it does look like the culprit.

Intersting, I had the numbers 504 and 1104188992./

Followed your suggestion for 504. Reboot safe boot, then normal.

Got the following errors

Oct 27 21:24:55 [name deleted]-2.local mdworker[582]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

Oct 27 21:24:55 [name deleted]-.local mdworker[581]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

Oct 27 21:25:46 [name deleted]-.local mdworker[866]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

Oct 27 21:25:46 [name deleted]-.local mdworker[867]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

Oct 27 21:27:12 [name deleted]-.local mdworker[885]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

Oct 27 21:27:12 [name deleted]-.local mdworker[884]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

Oct 27 21:30:32 [name deleted]-.local mdworker[1094]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

Oct 27 21:30:32 [name deleted]-.local mdworker[1095]: code validation failed in the process of getting signing information: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-67062 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -67062.)"

Then no more. Hopefully gone.

Unfortunately the solution was temporary. Appeared again the next day.

William, you wrote that you had the issue with UID 1104188992 as well? Did you check for it? I meant, that looks like all but an usual UID. I believe something else is cooking under the hood. Like some pieces of old applications left running.

I'd suggest to search for files own buy both UIDs. Then if you still have the issue you may try downloading "etreCheck" (just google it) and do a scan. It reports a few things that may be wrong in the installation.