Issues with the softwareupdated daemon after upgrading to Yosemite?

Ever since the upgrade to Yosemite, the softwareupdated process always consumes around 100% CPU.

I noticed this the other day when I closed my laptop at the end of the day and the area above the left side of the keyboard was very warm. Looking at Activity Monitor, the softwareupdated process was running at full blast. That also explains the horrible battery life that I have had since upgrading.

I waited to upgrade to Yosemite until after the first xx.xx.1 point release and ever since then the softwareupdated runs constantly, no matter how many times that I kill it.

Is there a solution for this?

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)


Disconnect from the network and reboot the Mac.

Then see if the process can clean itself up. Assuming it is under control, open system preferences and turn off all automatic checks under the app store pane.

At that point you can reconnect to the internet and see if things are solid before opening the App Store app again.


Had the same problem after upgrading to Yosemite and then updating. A reboot fixed the (not responding), but it is still a memory hog at almost 500 MB, the biggest process ! This solved it for me :

  1. Go to App Store in Preferences and disable "Automatically check for updates".
  2. In Activity Monitor, kill softwareupdated.
  3. IMPORTANT: Go to App Store in Preferences weekly to check for updates manually.

Hopefully Apple will reduce the size of this daemon in the next update.