syslogd - technical brief

Hey there,

some of us had the problem, that a process called syslogd is eating up all processor time. This makes Redline stuttering and lagging - no wonder when no cpu time is left.
You can see whether syslogd is hogging your cpu by opening "activity monitor" under "utilities" in the apps and sort the list of *all processes* by %.
If syslogd is at more than 10 percent, something is wrong, if it is at more than 95 percent, please read on.

IMPORTANT
I must refuse all responsability for your actions with your computer. the commands below influence the way your system is completing tasks, please use it at your own risk.


Syslog is logging events to your computer-log-files. nothing that special.
it writes events to log-files. the spec, given by apple, has some max-values per log-file used. they are at 5MB for /var/log/asl.db. if this file is much too large, just delete it and kill (or force kill) the syslogd in the activity monitor.

when it is behaving nice now, we are done.

if not... well, there is not a solution but a way to make the symptoms go away. Please do that only if you are experienced and now how to fix some things on your computer by yourself:
Deactivating syslogd: open the terminal, login as superuser (su /superuser/) and then "sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist". Kill the process once in activity monitor and syslogd wont start again. You may restart now if you feel better.
Be sure to turn it back on issuing "sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist" later on in order to have logs on what was going on on your computer.

In case this still doesn't help (which can't be but has been) issue a "sudo chmod 0 /usr/sbin/syslogd" and kill the process once in activity monitor. to revert it back, issue a "sudo chmod 555 /usr/sbin/syslogd" and you are back to where we started.

That's it, hope this helpes one or the other of you...

alphonse

leoantix wrote:/me looks at slow and hugs his 10.4.11

/me updates quickly to 10.5.5.

I was asked by Giles to chronicle the syslogd events that were happening to myself and others. Here is the email he sent back...

On 22 Oct 2008, at 20:55, JWB wrote:

You asked me to write to you about the 'syslogd' problem. I don't know if you have been following it so here is a little background...


Thanks for sending me that. Redline writes a lot of lines to the system log so it appears to be triggering the dread-syslogd-bug that has affected a lot of other Mac users.

I'll see if I can't cut down RL's usage of the system log in future.

In the meantime, doing this clears up the problem until the next time the DSB is triggered:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

Yours,
-- Giles.

It may not help with syslogd but it might help you cope:

Toad wrote:It may not help with syslogd but it might help you cope:

"Ctrl-P. why won't it print?!"

"Hello, I've got a Macintosh computer..."

Apple-P. Oh Eddie...