quicklookd and revisiond eating my CPU
I'm observing regular and abnormal CPU usage on my macbook pro. quicklookd
in par with revisiond
are eating together over of 50%. It drains my battery significantly and makes the whole machine hot.
I'm not sure when exactly it started but I'm suspecting latest 10.10.3 upgrade as I didn't notice this before.
After reading some post on the net I cleared ~Libraries/Cache
and /private/var/folders
then rebooted. It looked like the problem was gone (those processes didn't show up), but only for a while. The next day I resumed from sleep, again - quicklookd
and revisiond
started to burn my CPU.
Any clues how to get rid of this? What's causing this problem? It looks like these two processes are somehow connected, because when I cleared the cache and restarted none of them used a lot of cpu. Today, both of them do (quicklookd 24-30% , revisiond ~15%).
[Update]
Running sudo opensnoop -n revisiond
shows nothing.
Running sudo opensnoop -n quicklookd
brings endless list of entries like these:
UID PID COMM FD PATH
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 21 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
It goes on and on and on. It's just endless. FD
column is always 23
except two or three 21
.
[Update 2]
After few minutes I got some other entries besides 501 4783 quicklookd 23 /
(not pasting theme here as they were irrelevant)
And then again, whole lot of 501 4967 quicklookd 23 /
[Update 3]
I've also noticed that diskarbitrationd
and diskmanagementd
scores quite high (~ 5%) and stay on top of the process list (sorted by CPU usage) just below quicklookd
and revisiond
. Looks like this also might have something to do with this issue.
I've closed (cmd + q
all other apps to make sure nothing interferes the measurements).
[Update 4]
Found few interesting entries in console:
Failed to obtain sandbox extension for path=/Users/me/Library/Caches/com.apple.quicklook.satellite. Errno:1
CGSConnectionByID: 0 is not a valid connection ID.
[QL] Using too much memory (161 MB), hit critical threshold (120 MB), exiting immediately to clean up.
[QL] Unable to write memory cache on disk
In -[NSApplication(NSQuietSafeQuit) _updateCanQuitQuietlyAndSafely], _LSSetApplicationInformationItem(NSCanQuitQuietlyAndSafely) returned error -50
They repeat few regularly each day. Especially those about memory and invalid connection.
[Update 5]
sudo iosnoop -n quicklookd
revealed this:
UID PID D BLOCK SIZE COMM PATHNAME
501 5656 W 56385320 32768 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 56385320 4096 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 48100696 12288 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100816 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100840 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 56385640 28672 quicklookd ??/T/etilqs_kYNR5XinU71bydh
501 5656 W 56386736 32768 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 56386736 4096 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 48100696 12288 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100816 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100840 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 56387280 28672 quicklookd ??/T/etilqs_ejadCww3DunYuu3
cloudthumbnails.db
and cloudthumbnails.db-journal
repeats and repeats.
This is how I fixed this problem. It might help you but from what I've seen so far, even thought there are similar issues, the source of problems are different.
I've ran sudo iosnoop -n quicklookd
- it shown something like this:
UID PID D BLOCK SIZE COMM PATHNAME
501 5656 W 56385320 32768 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 56385320 4096 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 48100696 12288 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100816 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100840 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 56385640 28672 quicklookd ??/T/etilqs_kYNR5XinU71bydh
501 5656 W 56386736 32768 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 56386736 4096 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 48100696 12288 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100816 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100840 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 56387280 28672 quicklookd ??/T/etilqs_ejadCww3DunYuu3
501 5656 W 56474504 32768 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 56474504 4096 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db-journal
501 5656 W 48100696 12288 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100816 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 48100840 8192 quicklookd ??/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db
501 5656 W 56474568 28672 quicklookd ??/T/etilqs_QzHS30kC4YT8ETi
I gave it a shot and looked for cloudthumbnails.db
file. Bingo! Found it in /Users/me/Library/Application Support/Quick Look
and the quicklookd
was writing to cloudthumbnails.db-journal
like crazy. But it was writing small chunks, then deleting the file and writing those small chunks again. Unfortunately this is a binary file, so it's not easy to read, but I gave it a shot and just did tail cloudthumbnails.db-journal
. I got mostly gibberish, but I noticed repeated path /Users/me/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/
and some files there.
This is iCloud folder and for some reason quicklookd was unable to process those files. I deleted them (moved to trash and emptied) and TADA! It solved the problem.
I have no idea why this happened, why quicklookd
was unable to process those files. I've sent those files again to iCloud and everything was fine - no crazy behavior of quicklookd
.
I would try using opensnoop
to see what files quicklookd is looking at. There might be a particular files that it is either having trouble reading or writing to.
While they are using excessive CPU, open a Terminal window and type the following command. You'll be prompted for your password.
sudo opensnoop -n quicklookd
This should show you all the files that quicklookd is reading or writing to, and might help you identify if one particular file or folder of files is causing the issue.
Try the same thing for revisiond.