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aslmanager taking up 99% of CPU
Mac OS X sometimes spawns background processes that consume an inordinate amount of CPU, resulting in a slow computer that may have the fans roaring and be very hot (especially for laptops). There are several known processes that can cause this problem, most notably the various drive indexing utilities such as mds and mdworker. Another of these processes is the "aslmanager" utility, which is Apple's system log file manager for the "ASL data store" and is a relatively new addition to OS X.
Apple Discusions poster Robert Nicholson1-- "So aslmanager is taking 99% and Console.app hangs when started. Why does aslmanager need 99% of CPU and 2+ GB footprint?"
In past versions of Mac OS X, system and process log messages were received and managed by "syslogd" and the "syslog" utility. Under Mac OS X 10.5.6 Apple has included a new set of log functions in the "ASL" logging method and API. These new functions are run by the "aslmanager" process, which is invoked immediately after syslogd runs.
Apple is migrating log management over to using the new ASL logging functions for future versions of OS X, but there appear to be a few bugs in the current versions of the ASL utilities. While the specifics are unknown, it seems that currently the aslmanager utility will get stuck on certain functions.
Users have tried forcing the process to quit using Activity Monitor, but this is only a temporary solution, and also may cause data corruption. Therefore it is recommended to avoid using Activity Monitor to handle these problems, and instead try restarting the log management processes after clearing the log "data store" location. Users have found that after doing this, the process no longer slows the computer down.
Hopefully the bugs in aslmanager will be fixed in future updates.
Fix: Restart log managers after removing asl data Open the Terminal application and enter the following two commands to stop the log managers:
- sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
- sudo launchctl stop com.apple.aslmanager
Then create a folder on your desktop called "temp" (to store the moved "data store" files), and enter the following command in the Terminal to move the "ASL" data to the new temporary folder:
- sudo mv /var/log/asl/* ~/Desktop/temp/
Finally, restart the "syslogd" process with the following command (the aslmanager will be started when needed by syslogd, so it doesnt need to be manually restarted):
- sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
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My parents machine was using 295GB of 297...this helped tremendously....waiting to see if it comes back. Thanks much!
Killing syslogd with the 'kill' command doesn't work because launchd is configured to restart it automatically, similar to the way traditional init can be set to respawn critical daemons in inittab. If that reference is meaningless to you, you probably should avoid ever typing 'sudo kill' into a Terminal window. :) Using one of the interfaces to launchd (launchctl, service, or Lingon) is generally a better and safer approach.
The only good reason to stop the syslogd process is to restart it and have it reinitialize the parts of the logging subsystem it handles. Actually keeping it down (which you CAN do via launchd) probably would not do major harm, certainly not immediately. However, because it provides standard system services that any other software should be able to count on being present, you could find that really killing it and keeping it down indefinitely could cause other trouble. Grumpy old sysadmins with long memories of related OS's might claim that disabling syslogd will eventually lead to a kernel panic, but the mechanism for that is unlikely to survive in MacOS X, particularly since Apple reimplemented the entire logging subsystem starting with Tiger, replacing traditional syslog with their ASL architecture. Of course, if something were to go wrong with syslogd off, you'd have no logs to figure it out...
If everything is working properly you can just throw it out...
OK, but the files within the temp folder keep getting updated on my machine, as evidenced by their "Date Modified" times. It looks like something is using them.
Purely by accident, I found a cure. OSX 10.5.6 was manually downloaded and invoked. This began the slow problem. Days later I tried to Trash the 10.5.6 download to gain HD space. Imagine my surprise when Trash reported the Update 'still in use.'
I Restarted in Safe mode and was able to easily delete 10.5.6. My machine runs like a rocket since.
One quirk remains. Disk Utility reports 'ASL found in Applications, Unexpected.'
Hope clever computer folks can make sense of this behaviour.
Can the files in the Temp folder be deleted, or will they be deleted by the system once I log out?
I did delete the temp folder and everything seems to be fine, so thanks again!
- by hobagz January 3, 2010 8:35 PM PST
- So This has really messed up my safari since it no longer remembers any cookies or any other data from other sites which seems to be where the initial problem came from. how do i undo these changes? what sudo commands do i need to input into terminal?
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