CPU consumed by /usr/sbin/update

Chealion · Jun 15th, 2005, 11:35 PM

Hi,

Every so often (in increasingly short intervals) since getting Tiger I've noticed that a process called update begins to consume my CPU cycles and will never let them go.

The process update is found in /usr/sbin/update, and is run when the computer starts as it is "the daemon that flushes internal file system caches to disk frequently".

So my 7 day uptime (the last time was a week ago when my uptime was around 14 days) ends by having to force restart the computer. A simple restart will not suffice as the application I believe is hung and will not accept any kill signals. (So yes, sudo kill -9 will not work). Now I'm wondering, does anyone know why this could be happening?

Or is it just yet another graemlin in my hard drive causing this?

kps · Jun 16th, 2005, 10:42 AM

Reading the man pages for 'update' and 'sync' it may be that your disk writes are not completing due to disk damage or corruption. But this is just a guess.

Have you run any disk utility maintenance? Disk Warrior, DiskUtil, fsch...

RobTheGob · Jun 17th, 2005, 12:21 AM

I'm surprised that kill -9 does not work. I can't remember the last time that I wasn't able to stop something with kill -9...

Chealion · Jun 17th, 2005, 03:59 PM

RobTheGob - Kill won't work on processes that are still stuck within the kernel (in this case trying to do something with my disk, which isn't doing anything.) Everything else keeps working but the process eats CPU cycles because something went haywire. I'll have to try Apple Disk First Aid and let it loop overnight and see if it can find anything. (I hope it does, this hard drive is driving me batty with it's slow speed)

Chealion · Jun 23rd, 2005, 03:50 PM

Just as an update I had it occur again today, after having Apple Disk First Aid and TechTool check out my disk as A-OK (I don't have DiskWarrior). Does anyone else have any ideas as I can't figure this out for the life of me.

Chealion · Jul 8th, 2005, 04:34 AM

As an addendum, I had someone contact me via IM asking about whether I've solved the problem or not.

I recently got rid of roughly 10 gigs off my hard drive and I haven't had a problem since then so I'm guessing it may be VM and running out of space related but it doesn't seem to make sense because the sizes never came close to the space I had free as far as I could tell.

ArtistSeries · Jul 8th, 2005, 10:40 AM

Thanks for the update Chealion.
It's not really an answer (not your fault) but glad it is resolved.