Runaway aslmanager…

Posted Wed Nov 4, 2009 in

This afternoon the fans in my MacBook Pro went nuts. The system shouldn’t have been particularly busy, but it was.

I pulled up the dashboard to see what process or processes were hogging the CPU. Two processes were runaways — syslogd and aslmanager. Together they were gobbling both cores of the machine’s CPU. Nothing else was getting done.

Of course, I would have a conference call to receive when I wanted to use the computer to keep notes, plus the system had gone bonkers.

I opened a terminal window and killed both processes. After a few minutes, they restarted. So, I rebooted the system (“when in doubt, reboot”). Still no joy.

So, I searched the ‘net a bit (while on the conference call) and found a reference to a runaway aslmanager process. Still in the terminal, I went to the /var/log/aslmanager and deleted the file. That solved the problem.

I’m not sure exactly what the process does, but I think it’s kicked off by the syslogd daemon to assist managing the system logs. System logs will hog disk resources if not properly managed.

That was weird, but I’m glad I figured it out. I also got a lot done on the conference call.