asked on OS X coreservicesd using lots of RAM
Have a problem. I am running a Mac Pro with 16 GB RAM and OS X 10.7.3. My typical daily run is to log in fresh on Monday. Start up Mail and Safari as well as a VMWare Fusion Windows 7 session using 3 GB RAM. Over the course of the day I will also start up FireFox for the Mac and Word or Excel for the Mac. Sometimes I leave these running and sometimes I will do a CMD-Q to shut them down. At the end of the day, I will leave everything running and have the Mac do a screen saver over night. At the end of the week I'll shut all my VMware stuff down and actually log out of OS X. I noticed that the system was being a little sluggish and when I fired up Activity Monitor, noticed that the coreservicesd process was taking over 6 GB Real RAM and over 8 GB of Virtual RAM. I shut everything down and restarted the Mac and when I got everything going again, that process was only taking 60 MB of RAM. Over the time it's been up, that number has risen to 277 MB, but that's a far cry from 6 GB. Any ideas what might be causing this?
Apple OS
Last Comment
jhyiesla
ASKER
An update. I left my Mac running and in a screen saver mode with the Fusion Windows 7 also running. When I left last night, corservicesd was taking up less than 300 MB of RAM, this morning it is showing 1 GB of RAM in use. Anyone know of a way to stop this leak? I suppose I could reboot each morning, but I hate to have to spend the time starting everything up each day.
Are you sure that it is a leak. The whole purpose of having a lot of RAM is that your machine runs faster because there is less swapping and less data being purged. When the coreservices are all puffed out, does the machine slow down or stay quick?
ASKER
I suppose that I don't "know" that it's a leak and yes, I understand that lots of RAM gives things lots of room to run. However, I just checked this morning and over night with nothing going on except an occasional Time machine backup I went from 1.06 GB of memory in use to 1.6 GB. The thing that got me started writing this in the first place was that the system did real sluggish and when I checked CPU and RAM usages, coreservicesd was using almost 7 GB of RAM. And at the time I don't think that I had anything out of the ordinary running.
ASKER
I may have found a related issue. I decided to check my console logs. There were a ton of coreservicesd errors reading FMOD WATCH EVENTS DROPPED.
I did some research on this and found a related item with vmWare Fusion. I did the changes as they suggested. I also noticed a couple of other services that seemed to be sometimes associated with the above error. One was a Sugarsync service and the other was an old service related to BTMM on Mobile Me. I do use Sugarsync, but not really to keep things in sync. I use the Mac backup application to back up certain files to their Magic Briefcase folder, but there is no active synching going on. The BTMM service was reporting failures to start and I tracked that down to the fact that MM is no longer... So I followed instructions I found I'm a thread to delete the old keychain entry for BTMM and now that service is connecting successfully.
I know that it's bad form to change more than one thing at a time, but the BTMM change needed to be made and the changes in features in Fusion are not things that I really care about so wouldn't miss them anyway.
I'll see how it looks tomorrow.
I did some research on this and found a related item with vmWare Fusion. I did the changes as they suggested. I also noticed a couple of other services that seemed to be sometimes associated with the above error. One was a Sugarsync service and the other was an old service related to BTMM on Mobile Me. I do use Sugarsync, but not really to keep things in sync. I use the Mac backup application to back up certain files to their Magic Briefcase folder, but there is no active synching going on. The BTMM service was reporting failures to start and I tracked that down to the fact that MM is no longer... So I followed instructions I found I'm a thread to delete the old keychain entry for BTMM and now that service is connecting successfully.
I know that it's bad form to change more than one thing at a time, but the BTMM change needed to be made and the changes in features in Fusion are not things that I really care about so wouldn't miss them anyway.
I'll see how it looks tomorrow.
ASKER
The weird thing is, if it does have something to do with SugarSync, why am I not seeing the same thing on my iMac at home? It's also running SS.
ASKER
I seem to have eliminated some of the issues by disabling the SugarSync Manager. However, I am still getting, occasionally throughout the day, instances of tons of coreservicesd messages. Doing some research has made me think that they are somehow linked to vmWare Fusion. To test I found the errors being generated in Console and then I shut down Fusion and they just stopped. Later in the day I migrated my VM to Parallels and am running in that now. I'll monitor to see if that makes a difference.
Even if it does, that does beg the question: why would two separate apps cause this problem?
Even if it does, that does beg the question: why would two separate apps cause this problem?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
THIS SOLUTION ONLY AVAILABLE TO MEMBERS.
View this solution by signing up for a free trial.
Members can start a 7-Day free trial and enjoy unlimited access to the platform.
ASKER
Accepting my research as the solution for the problem. Since I stopped using Fusion, the coreservicesd errors have gone away and I have SS manager running again and even that is not tripping the errors. I like fusion and would like to be able to use it, but it's just too detrimental to use for too long. Parallels seems to not have this issue.