Runaway syslog eats up CPU

rockthegloberocktheglobe
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
My fiancee's Macbook is having an issue where the syslog will take over an incredible amount of the CPU (Activity Monitor frequently has it pegged in the high-90s-percentile) and run continuously, making the machine heat up and causing the fans to run continuously, which drains the battery quickly. I've done a bunch of searches on it, but the only fixes I've found refer to syslogd (which is not causing problems on her machine), not syslog.



I've still tried to apply a number of those fixes which have all failed, including manually killing the process in Activity Monitor (which caused huge Airport/Time Capsule problems on my own MBP) and deleting the asl.db file (which didn't help at all)... kind of running out of options here and getting frustrated.



She's running OS 10.5.8 on a 2.16 GHz chip with 1GB of RAM. Can anyone help? Many thanks!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    It could be that the log files have a lot of entries in them. There are two logs to check out:



    /private/var/log/asl

    /private/var/log/system.log



    (use the Finder Go menu > Go to Folder and type in /private/var/log)



    The asl one is a folder of log files. You can list by size to see if any are particularly large.



    You can delete the logs but it won't start writing to them again until reboot - I prefer to copy null over them using terminal command:



    sudo cp /dev/null /private/var/log/system.log



    Always drag the file into the terminal window if you do this to save accidentally deleting something.



    Those log files show up in the Console app (in the Utilities folder) - if the files are large, it may have entries telling you if a particular program is dropping a lot of messages into them.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    rockthegloberocktheglobe Posts: 14member
    Thanks! I checked out the log files (including a bunch of GZipped System Logs), and it seems that most are at a manageable size -- couple of hundred KB at the most. However, LongTTL.U0.asl is at 62MB and growing... I was wondering if dumping that file would help or whether it would cause some damage?
  • Reply 3 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by RockTheGlobe View Post


    LongTTL.U0.asl is at 62MB and growing... I was wondering if dumping that file would help or whether it would cause some damage?



    They're all log files so they'll be rebuilt after a reboot. It is a good idea to get into the habit of moving files to trash and not deleting so that you have the option of moving things back though so move it to trash and reboot. My LongTTL.U0.asl log is 24kB - it looks like a filesystem log.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    rockthegloberocktheglobe Posts: 14member
    Looks like taking out that file might've worked! Thanks so much!
Sign In or Register to comment.