flushing cfprefsd causing excessive wake ups.

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flushing cfprefsd causing excessive wake ups.

Running 10.9.5.

My company's Mac has a policy process (jamf) that executes killall cfprefsd, which I understand sends a terminate signal to these daemons. According to the man page (yes this all the info there is):

cfprefsd provides preferences services for the CFPreferences and NSUserDefaults APIs

My search on the webs shows that this terminate signal triggers cfprefsd daemons to reread all plist files. http://manytricks.com/blog/?p=3049

However I am getting into a situation where the system freezes (showing the dreaded beach ball) until it completely has restarted the daemons (which can take 1-5 minutes). On my personal Macbook (running 10.9.4) I don't observe this problem when running killall cfprefsd.

THis is what I find in the logs. Any ideas what can cause the excessive wake ups? Where do I look to find the problem causing this?

13-3-'15 11:30:36.063 AM sudo[54484]: root : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/killall cfprefsd

13-3-'15 11:31:28.000 AM kernel[0]: process who[54487] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 864; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 45001

13-3-'15 11:31:28.000 AM kernel[0]: process cfprefsd[54488] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 864; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 45001

13-3-'15 11:31:28.000 AM kernel[0]: process cfprefsd[54489] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 864; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 45001

13-3-'15 11:31:38.260 AM ReportCrash[54493]: Invoking spindump for pid=54489 wakeups_rate=864 duration=53 because of excessive wakeups

13-3-'15 11:31:39.171 AM spindump[54496]: No microstackshots found

13-3-'15 11:31:39.170 AM spindump[54496]: No microstackshots found

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Mar 13, 2015 5:44 PM

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Answer 1

pbodifee Author

Level 1

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Mar 13, 2015 10:44 PM in response to pbodifee

As an additional test to rule out spindump (known for trashing the system 😠) I unloaded spindump and linked it to true in order to do nothing:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/true /usr/sbin/spindump

However this has no effect on preventing the dreaded beach ball while cfprefsd get their terminate signal.

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Answer 2

pbodifee Author

Level 1

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Mar 31, 2015 10:40 AM in response to pbodifee

It turned out that I was running McAfee VirusScan version 9.7.0 which is for Yosemite. After downgrading to version 9.6.0 the observed problems of flushing cfprefsd went away.

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Answer 3

BobHarris

Level 9

53,045 points

Mar 31, 2015 11:37 AM in response to pbodifee

NOTE: The forum long term contributors suggest against running any Anti-malware package, nor Mac cleaners, nor memory cleaners.

These packages tend to cause performance slow downs, and kernel panics with not real benefit to the Mac user.

How does Mac OS X protect me?

<http://www.thesafemac.com/mmg-builtin/>

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Answer 4

pbodifee Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 31, 2015 2:56 PM in response to BobHarris

Bob, trust me I have none of those packages on my own MacBook. But this is on a MacBook provided by my company and I have no control over the security policies applied and software packages used. And while I agree mostly with the points from the article you refer to, I understand the needs of a company to protect its intellectual capital as well as the privacy of the people they engage with.

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