Memory Issue with Mavericks - installd process - RESOLVED

[James Steele]

Well guess what... today I get this strange error message saying my startup disk is full. Turns out that even though I have 24GB of physical RAM in my machine, there was a process in the background eating RAM like crazy. From the time I boot, a process called "installd" just goes to work taking more and more memory. You have to force quit the process in the Activity Monitor to stop the runaway freight train that will gobble all the RAM in your system.

Below is a QT movie I made for just a few seconds. On boot the "installd" process will be only 100MB or so and then it just starts growing, exceeding the kernel memory, and continuing onward rapidly.



Here's a topic where it's discussed:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/question ... -mavericks

I tried resetting PRAM, no joy. Going to try an SMC reset in a minute as described here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964?view ... cale=en_US

Now, I don't want to talk out of turn, but this issue seems to coincide with me installing the iStat menus demo last night and I know that taps into the SMC or System Management Controller and I'm worried that messed with it somehow. I uninstalled it but still having issues.

I hope I can solve this one with the SMC reset as I don't relish having to do a major system restore and don't know what the status of my Time Machine backup is. Anybody seen this firsthand and fixed it easily, please let me know!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I've had the iStat Pro pn my machines since waaaay before Mavericks and never saw anything like that. Consistently, the "Insalld" process uses 9.5MB even after hours of use.

[James Steele]

I've had the iStat Pro pn my machines since waaaay before Mavericks and never saw anything like that. Consistently, the "Insalld" process uses 9.5MB even after hours of use.

Yeah. That may not be it. Apparently though SOMETHING happened and now every time I boot, I get the runaway installd process which is currently at 1.60GB and climbing!

Apparently the process is associated with Software Update. I tried turning off automatic updates and that didn't help. I force quit the process upon boot, then ran Software Update and it restarted the process and it hovered at only a couple MB of RAM after that. But from boot... it just goes crazy. In the time it took me to type this...it has now used 3GB of RAM... oops... now it's 3.62GB...

This is WAY screwed!!!! I'm looking a damn disc wipe and reinstall of my apps! Color me IRRITATED!!!

[James Steele]

I do have a Time Machine backup of my boot drive from before the issue started. Not exactly sure how to restore. I was thinking of restoring just the "System" folder from the Time Machine backup to another drive, then booting from a different drive, deleting the System folder off my main boot drive and then copying over the System folder I retrieved from Time Machine and see if that will get me back to where I was before this started happening.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Found this:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/question ... ing-my-cpu

[James Steele]

Thanks! Yep... I saw that. I booted from my Utility Partition and have been patiently waiting while the "System" folder from my boot SSD copies over to my audio drive. I've already deleted the "System" folder from the boot SSD while waiting for the Time Machine backup of that folder from a few days ago to be restored. Just finished. Now I'm copying it back to my boot SSD and hoping whatever weirdness causing this had it's origins in something changed in the System folder and I'll be okay. If not, I could try restoring the entire boot drive from Time Machine from a backup from before this started happening. Ugh.

[James Steele]

What I'm NOT in the mood to do, but might be necessary is a totally clean install. One of the problems I have is this OWC Accelsior SSD is only 120GB. I tend to keep a lot of emails and other stuff, so my Home folder resides on another drive that has more room. I'm currently copying the "System" folder from three days ago back to the SSD and of course it's going a LOT faster. I'll be able to boot from it in about 5 minutes and if all goes well, this crazy installd process memory leak will be gone.

I must say... I'm sort of lamenting the movie to Mavericks. To me, it seems like Mountain Lion was refined, quick and trouble free and even Now Contact and Up-To-Date (granted on VERY borrowed time) still worked on Mountain Lion. Plus a lot of other stuff worked better on ML. Waiting for 10.9.2 or something to come along.

[James Steele]

May have screwed the pooch here. After copying the older System Folder over, I set the SSD as the startup disk, and the Apple logo appears but I'm getting the little "in progress" circle thing underneath it. I don't know how long I should let it spin. For all I know it's repairing something and it might boot after a while. I'm going to let it go for a while before doing something more drastic.

I don't have a backup "image" of this drive, just a Time Machine backup of the volume as a file hierarchy. Since my Home folder resided on another volume I could always format, reinstall Mavericks from the installer and them designate my home folder again and be where I leftover with Mail and Calendar and the Apple apps. Of course I'd have to reinstall other apps and reauthorize plug-ins and all that joy.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Sorry you're in a quagmire there James. Seems our machines are getting too smart for their or our own good.

[James Steele]

Sorry you're in a quagmire there James. Seems our machines are getting too smart for their or our own good.

I'm actually in better shape than I thought I'd be. Ran the Mavericks 10.9 installer and installed on my SSD drive without formatting it first. Looks like it actually successfully downgraded to 10.9 from 10.9.1.

I'm thinking I might just stay with 10.9 for a while. Seems Mail and Calendar are working fine. Don't know what components were updated with 10.9.1.

[James Steele]

I'll go ahead and install the 10.9.1 update. I'm really relieved to know you can downgrade a 10.9.1 install to 10.9 just by running the 10.9 installer.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Bit of good news! Fingers and toes crossed.

[James Steele]

Well it did solve that problem but man was that strange! And it still just incapacitate your Mac after just a few minutes after booting!

[James Steele]

Marking this "RESOLVED" insomuch as I "fixed" it. Still, I wish I had some clue just exactly what the culprit was.

[bayswater]

I've seen a few reports of runaway processes in 10.9. I had one myself that appeared as launchd, although it was not running the process mentioned in your link. I was able to simply kill the process in Activity Monitor.