Mac OSX slow, caused by aslmanager
For a while I had been experiencing random slowness on my iMac. This slowness could only been solved by a reboot of my iMac but this was just a temporary solution. I didn’t look for a specific cause until it began bothering me for a while and I had the time to look into the issue. I opened my activity monitor (be sure to select “All processes” from the dropdown) and I noticed that a certain process called “aslmanager” was using all of my resources.
The “aslmanager” process is Apple’s System Logfile manager which will be used as a replacement for syslogd in future versions of Mac OSX. But this is a rather new service which contains a few bugs that cause the application to use more than 2GB of virtual memory.
The solution to this issue isn’t to kill this process as it can cause data corruption but to restart the process after cleaning out the “data store” (where the process keeps its files). This can be done by following these few steps:
- open the terminal utility
- stop the syslog with the following command: sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
- stop the aslmanager with the following command: sudo launchctl stop com.apple.aslmanager
- create a new folder on your desktop with a random name like “temp”
- move all of the files from the folder /var/log/asl/ towards the new folder on your desktop, this can be done with the command: mv /var/log/asl/* ∼Desktop/temp/
- you can now start the syslogd with the following command: sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
You may have noticed that we didn’t start the aslmanager manually because this process will be started automatically when this is needed by the syslogd.
This was a solution to the high load on my Mac and I haven’t encountered this issue until now.