syslogd got you down? Try this fix

December 13th, 2007 by Mike | Posted in mac os x |

So, I was having a serious issue this morning with my CPU on my MacBook running at around 120% for the first hour of work (actually this was happening last night while I was away from my computer too) and I was getting tired of my computer running slow as hell, and therefore I investigated.

Now, the reason why my processor was running so hot was because of a system process called syslogd. This process basically logs all sorts of cool stuff for our computer in the background, and shouldn’t take up much processor usage, but here was where my problem began.

I did some searching around and found this thread in the Apple Support forums. It turns out I’m not the only one this is happening to. What appears to be happening is simply a pre-backup preparation for Time Machine that ends up erroring during logging and causes your CPU to go haywire. The problem here is that even after force quitting syslogd, the daemon opens up again and picks up where it left off, even after a restart of the machine.

Luckily enough, there is a fix for this. In the thread from the Apple Support forums, user ‘fredrikhw’ managed to find a somewhat simple way to fix this along with some help from this MacOSXHints.com post (yes, this did work for me).

How to fix a maniac syslogd:
(You will need admin access to perform this)

1. Open System Preferences
2. Click on Time Machine
3. Turn Backups OFF
4. Open Activity Monitor (Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor)
   • If you don’t have it set already in Activity Monitor, above where it says ‘Show’, above, make sure All Processes is selected.
5. Find syslogd and then click Quit Process (upper left corner of Activity Monitor)
   • You’ll be prompted for an admin password, and after you type one in and press OK, syslogd will be ‘dead’
6. Finally, open Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)
7. When Terminal opens, type this (you can copy & paste this):
   sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
   • This command turns system logging OFF
8. Press enter, and you will, again, be prompted for an admin password. Type the password in and press enter and voila! all fixed!
9. Edit (10:45AM): After searching a bit more online I came across this post in the MacRumors.com forums and in case you want to turn logging back ON (which you may want to do to in case you have any other system-based problems) by typing this command:
   sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plis
   • Also, as mentioned in that forum post, you may want to check your system.log file located in /var/log/ as it may be taking up some extraneous space (mine is 31.5MB, but in the forum post the poster’s system.log was 500MB)
     • To navigate to this file, open a new Finder window and press Command (the Apple button) + G and type
       /var/log/
       and press Enter. Scroll down to the system.log file and press Command + I to get the info on the file and check it’s size. Now I’m no expert, but if it’s over 500MB, I would trash it IF you need the space. I can’t guarantee this won’t cause any problems if you delete this file, so proceed with caution.

Now, I have only just done this today and I’m not 100% sure on if this is a permanent fix and I don’t know if this means I need to have Time Machine OFF from now on or not, or if it simply needs to be off for when syslogd is getting killed or whatever, but for now, I know that syslogd is no longer effing up my computer and I can be happy about that.