You know you’ve hit a rare strange bug in Mac OS X when…
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshMay 2nd, 2004 • 11:35 am
You know you’ve hit a rare strange bug in Mac OS X when a search in Google for the key phrase in the symptoms of your problem returns… no results.
Right now, I have one of my two processors constantly peaking at 100% usage, while the other one is around 50%… And I am not doing anything with my computer! If I look at Activity Monitor, and sort the processes by % of CPU, the top process, far above the rest, is a process called “LSRecentTool”, which is using up 100%, i.e. the full power of one CPU.
A search for “LSRecentTool” with Google returns next to no results (only two forum entries at sciforums.com that only mention LSRecentTool incidentally).
A search for the phrase in Apple’s Discussions web site returns only one discussion, again of only marginal interest.
Oh well. I guess I just have to restart my machine and hope it disappears, and then forget about it.
May 2nd, 2004 at May 02, 04 | 10:52 pm
Ozean: No, I didn’t use sudo. Probably should have tried that. Too late now: I’ve restarted the machine (and the process is gone, of course). I have to reconfigure my entire machine anyway, since I suspect that my original internal hard drive is having fits that cause system-wide freezes.
May 2nd, 2004 at May 02, 04 | 10:27 pm
Did you sudo the kill command?
Perhaps a cleaning out of location service prefs and related cache items is in order for your machine?
May 2nd, 2004 at May 02, 04 | 12:54 pm
killing the process would probably solve the problem. not sure what kicks off that process- it’s not running on my machine, but `pstree` would show you.
May 2nd, 2004 at May 02, 04 | 9:41 pm
Thanks for the suggestions, but killing doesn’t work. I’ve tried “kill” with the process ID and “kill -9” with the process ID. Doesn’t do a thing. Activity Monitor says the parent process is “coreservicesd”.
May 2nd, 2004 at May 02, 04 | 12:48 pm
it’s related to the launch services:
> locate LSRecentTool
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/
Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/
Versions/A/Support/LSRecentTool
doing a `strings` on the command shows it looks at the recentitems, app and doc aliases, etc. so either one of those sources it’s querying is screwed or maybe there’s a deadlock.
May 19th, 2004 at May 19, 04 | 4:49 pm
You know you’ve hit a rare strange bug in Mac OS X when you Google it and the only result is this page.
For the record, “sudo kill -9” doesn’t do anything. Inspecting it in Activity Viewer only froze my machine.
What really gets me is that it seems this process is responsible for updating the “Recent Items” portion of the Apple menu. What the heck? Can’t I turn that crap off somewhere?
Cheers,
Matt
May 19th, 2004 at May 19, 04 | 10:37 pm
Matt: Thanks for the added information. Considering that I never use Apple’s Recent Items feature myself (I much prefer Default Folder X), I too wouldn’t mind the ability to turn it off, especially if it’s buggy. But somehow I don’t think it’s something that Apple is working on actively right now :-/.
September 25th, 2005 at Sep 25, 05 | 1:48 pm
I experienced the same problem desribed by Pierre. It was solved by removing the file
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems.plist. The idea for the solution was taken from matt’s post.May 21st, 2007 at May 21, 07 | 7:15 pm
This worked for me:
killall -HUP LSRecentToolWoohoo. :)