Finding the secd process using 13GB of RAM was a bit of a shock. Watching its RAM consumption continue to increase, indicates a memory leak. Is this something anyone else has noticed? And any possible solutions?
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10), 16 GB RAM
Console is also filling up with the following:
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 4:16:27.282 PM secd[5736]: xv2n2c5fwNdkD6xVUecEae7nvR object 22C824DD dropping from manifest: not found in datasource
And also this ominous one:
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 4:11:03.349 PM secd[5736]: SecOTRSFindKeysForMessage SecOTRSession key cache was full. Should never happen, spooky.
Having gone through all my devices and turned off iCloud Keychain sync, and then reenabling each device, has seemed to have stopped the memory leak. Hope this helps anyone else with a similar issue.
What exactly is secd? I can find nothing on the internet. It is using up 4.73 GB (out of 8 GB) of memory on my 17" MBP running Yosemite 10.10.1. It is only using 1.2 GB (out of 8 GB) on my retina MBP running the same OS.
secd is related to keychain sync, but it should not be using more than a hundred megabytes. So both of your Macs seem to be displaying the same issue. Do you have any other devices that are, or were using icloud keychain recently? Or even a computer migration recently?
Turning off keychain sync across all your devices should fix the issue. The tricky part is when you have devices that you can no longer disable keychain sync on, because you no longer have access to them. You can see all your devices that are registered to iCloud on the iCloud Settings page here https://icloud.com/#settings
Hope this helps.
For a short-term fix I found that typing the following from the terminal on an affected computer
launchctl stop com.apple.secd
launchctl start com.apple.secd
i.e.,stopping and restarting the secd, also seems to fix it (at least in the short term.) Mine was up to 6 GB.
Oddly enough, all I did was restart both affected computers and secd use went back under 20 MB and has stayed there.
For me the problem came back after a few days. I haven't figured out yet what triggers it.
Pra mim resolveu! Apenas desativei a sincronia de chaves
secd was up to 29.46GB as of this morning of memory!
Trying the above suggestions to resolve it.
Thanks for the call-out. I just checked, and I've got a million of 'em in my logs, too...
1/18/15 10:07:09.535 PM secd[268]: SecOTRSFindKeysForMessage SecOTRSession key cache was full. Should never happen, spooky.
Not an ideal or comforting log message. Seems definitely a bug.
The problem returned for me with the iOS 8.1.3 and Yosemite 10.10.2 updates. On all my Macs secd was burning through memory, reaching 20GB in a few short hours. iPhone was running super hot, and battery was draining at an alarming rate. Turned off iCloud Keychain on all my devices, including four Macs, two iPhones and an iPad. To have to do this after every iOS update, as has been the case to this point, is the antithesis of what Apple is all about. The "it just works" moniker does not apply here, and this solution is one that took me many months to uncover. Not something the average user is going to know how to do. Likely, most have to get around this problem by doing a clean install of iOS. Hopefully, some find this post helpful.
So calling into customer support I was given a solution that may have fixed this problem.
These are the steps i followed:
This fixed the problem for me at least for the short term. Hopefully it keeps things going smoothly from now on and works for everyone else.
Thanks - I think this helped, but will give it a day or two to see what happens.
My secd was over 32 GB the other day and the iMac wasn't quite its usual self. After restarting, secd's memory usage dropped away, but has been steadily creeping up over the last couple of days and was over 5GB this morning. So I tried dragging the Keychains folder to the trash and restarting.
The thing about dragging your keychain to the trash and restarting is, on logging back in you may be asked for a pile of passwords to all your mail accounts and your keychain will be empty!
I filled out all the requests for icloud passwords, but for the keychain to update properly, this took a while. I think what saved me from panicking about losing all my passwords, was going into System Preferences and signing into iCloud there. I was also requested to verify my iCloud login from another device (e.g., iPAD). I think this is what restored my keychain from the cloud.
Once the keychain had updated itself, I restarted the iMac again, and Mail returned to normal (no more requests for mail account passwords).
The only thing that wasn't restored after restarting was automatic keychain access to my time machine. I had to enter the password and save it to the keychain.
Worked! At least for now...
This actually just happened to me on Mac OS Sierra, and this is the top Google hit so I thought I'd post my fix:
My iCloud keychain was turned off for all of my devices (I use 1Password) and turning it on in my mac iCloud settings made secd go from 95% of CPU usage to 0.0%.
So yeah, if you're on Sierra, keychain is off, and you're looking at this thread, just turn it on.
secd Process Memory Leak
