launchd

Investigating a 'Throttling respawn' error in the OS X Console

The system console lists much of the output of running programs as they perform various tasks, which includes errors and warnings that are not otherwise shown to you. For instance, if you can't start up Web sharing on your system but don't see any error messages, then you can check in the Console utility to see if any console messages are generated there when you try to enable Web sharing.

Even if you do not know what the error messages mean, you can copy them and ask people about them to get more insight into how to troubleshoot … Read more

Troubleshooting-utility news and updates

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates for a couple of maintenance tools, and a great option for managing launch daemon and launch agent files, as well as a couple of hardware monitoring tools.

Maintenance The popular maintenance tool Cocktail has been updated … Read more

AppleScript Fun: Automatically changing Safari's downloads folder

While the various programs and services on a computer are meant to offer you convenience, there are times when you may need to do repetitive tasks using the various tools and programs on the system. In these cases, the use of scripting tools can be exceptionally useful. Unlike programming, scripting is when you take a set of current tools and utilities and automate their interactions with commands. For instance, with Javascript you can tell a browser to change the way it renders HTML content, or with Automator you can tell the Finder to organize files in a certain way.

Recently … Read more

Tackling a 'throttling respawn' message in the console

In OSX, background tasks are started by the main system launcher process called "launchd," which will invoke processes either at bootup, at specific time intervals (as is the case with Time Machine), or on demand when needed (such as when printing). Sometimes if a process is having trouble starting in OS X the launcher may start outputting errors in the console that mention it will "throttle respawn" for the process and will try to load it again in 10 seconds. An example of this error is as follows:

2011/05/27 5:14:11 AM &… Read more

Console error message: 'Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds'

After running your system for a while and using various applications, you may receive an error stating, "Throttling Respawn: Will start in 10 seconds," over and over again. These messages are usually associated with a plist file and will repeat every 10 seconds for as long as the system is booted.

12/30/09 9:20:13 AM com.apple.launchd.peruser.50186 (com.akamai.client.plist) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds 12/30/09 9:20:23 AM com.apple.launchd.peruser.50186 (com.akamai.client.plist) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds 12/… Read more