Etrecheck scan - items listed as 'killed'

Linc thinks he should be the only user on these forums who should have and use "special" scripts and tools to use to troubleshoot users Macs.

A very elitist and selfish attitude, as far as I am concerned.

Please describe the problem, if you have one, in as much relevant detail as possible. The "etrecheck" fad hasn't made that step any less necessary. The usual results of posting etrecheck output on this site without a full description of the problem are very poor.

The many "failed" or "killed" warnings that etrecheck sometimes spews are not a reason to reinstall the OS.

The better your description of the problem, the better the chance of a solution.

For example, if the computer is slow, which specific actions are slow? Is it slow all the time, or only sometimes? What changes did you make, if any, just before it became slow? Have you seen any alerts or error messages? Have you done anything to try to fix it? Most importantly, do you have a current backup of all data? If the answer to the last question is "no," back up now. Ask if you need guidance. Do nothing else until you have a backup.

Please post the whole Etrecheck report.

It''s possible your Mac has insufficient amount of RAM.

2 GBs or less amount of RAM is not enough to efficiently run newer versions of OS X and, specifically, OS X Yosemite.

Obviously, you don't need "etrecheck" to tell you how much RAM you have. You can find that out from the About This Mac box in the Apple menu. In fact, "etrecheck" is incapable of telling you anything that you couldn't easily find out without it.

There are two things I don't like about it. One is that it's an attempt to plagiarize the methods I use on this site, and not a very good one at that, from what I've seen. The other is that it has encouraged people who are unqualified to give technical advice to think that they can now do so, with really dismal results.

I don't read "etrecheck" output. If you have a question about that software, it should be directed to the developer.

Unless you can provide official copyright or patent on your methods, and direct infringements, such as they are, plagariize is a pretty harsh accusation to make.

At least Etresoft's program provides useful data at a glance versus your methods that produces a long, lengthy and pedantic "piano roll" of data that most of us here really don't want our spend volunteered time plowing through for answers.

If this is really bothersome for you, why don't you simply leave these forums and find other Mac related forums to continue to impart your considerable Mac knowledge to instead of constantly belittling others who welcome other users methods and help by providing such trouble shooting tools that aren't costing anyone anything and are provided and developed by others at no to other users cost and NO profit to themselves.

Drop the attitude! Enough is enough, already!

And for the record, I know plenty about Macs, Mr.Davis, but I won't be spending much more of my lifetime continuing to reach for the top of this support communities' reputation pyramid.

Those red entries are a side effect of new behaviour in Yosemite. Before Yosemite, under low memory conditions, the system would swap the memory used by inactive processes to disk. For certain system processes, Yosemite will instead just kill them. In theory, the new method in Yosemite should result in a faster system because it isn't swapping to disk as much. In practice, more people are complaining about slowdowns in Yosemite than they did with previous OS versions - or at least it seems that way to me.

In one way, I like this new behaviour because it allows EtreCheck to show problems that have occurred in the past, but are not actively happening. Before Yosemite, we had to look at the page outs value to see if the system had been running out of RAM. Whether or not someone has adequate RAM depends on the software they use. Photoshop, for example, is very greedy about memory. These "killed" processes are not evidence that there is anything wrong with the system. That is the way it is supposed to work. What is wrong is that such EtreCheck reports come from people who are complaining about slowness with Yosemite that they had never experienced before. It is the slowness that is the problem, not the red "killed" entries.

It is leading me to believe that 4 GB RAM may be inadequate for Yosemite. Otherwise, people's machines would be running better under Yosemite and they wouldn't have started posting all of these EtreCheck reports with these "killed" processes.

The most important thing to remember about EtreCheck is that it should be accompanied by a good description of the problem you are experiencing. It should also not be abbreviated in any way. Any particular entries in "red" may not have any meaning. EtreCheck is designed to provide a snapshot of your entire system. I am not particularly happy about the way people focus on the "red" entries. They are almost never the problem, just symptoms. In most cases, entries in green are the ones causing the problem. If anyone has any suggestions about a better way to approach this, I would love to hear it. At the the red gets people worried enough to ask about it. Then, other people here on Apple Support Communities can read the report and identify any real problem if they exist.

In your case, I see no major problems. My biggest concern would be SMC Fan Control. OS X generally doesn't need help from any "memory clean", "clean up", or antivirus tools. Anyone installing one of those tools is likely to make the machine run worse, not better. SMCFanControl does fall into that category. The "red" entries will slowly go away on their own as processes are automatically restarted on demand. If you are experiencing a specific problem, then start a new thread about that problem and include an EtreCheck report to provide basic information about your system. That report might also include some "green" items like "clean up" or antivirus software that are most likely the cause of any such problem.

HunterBD wrote:

Well, I'm just an everyday USER - I don't give advice to other folk here!

That's one of the problems that EtreCheck is designed to fix. 🙂

There are no "qualifications" required to contribute to Apple Support Communities. If you are a user of Apple's products and have some expertise in some area, then there is almost always someone else who may know less. Why not help them if you can? Nobody knows everything about all products. Some people only answer questions about iPhones and other people only answer questions about Final Cut Pro, for example. I think everyone has some specific area of expertise where they could help someone else. One of the barriers to that is finding out basic information about the other person's machine. Do they have enough RAM to run Final Cut Pro? Does their machine even support Handoff? Is their hard drive failing? Can they upgrade their RAM? These are the kinds of basic information that EtreCheck is designed to easily answer so you can provide faster, more accurate help to someone else.

EtreCheck was designed specifically to help people who are answering questions here on Apple Support Communities. That is why it rarely provides specific information except in the most obvious cases like low RAM or a failing hard drive. In most cases, the "red" entries are simply there to encourage someone to ask about them and engage with some other community member who can help them identify and correct the actual problem.

From Linc's perspective, EtreCheck does generate really dismal results - because it helps people he considers unqualified help other people solve problems with their Apple products. As far as plagiarism is concerned, EtreCheck is open source and anyone is welcome to review the source code to see if there are any similarities between EtreCheck and any of Linc's scripts.