“Host Relauncher” mystery

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
August 12th, 2003 • 5:28 pm

This is a problem that I have been experiencing from time to time under Mac OS X. After weeks and sometimes months of uptime with no performance problems, one day I notice that things on my dual 1.25 GHz G4 are a bit sluggish. I take a look at my MenuMeters indicators, and they SHOW that CPU usage for both processors is way above normal, somewhere in the vicinity of 70-90%.

So I go to the Terminal and type top -u. The list that appears shows that there is a process called “Host Relauncher” that’s gobbling up between 60 and 90% of CPU processing power. I try to kill the process, but it’s owned by root, and it refuses to be killed, even with sudo.

The only solution I know is to restart the computer.

I have no idea what this “Host Relauncher” process is and what it does and what causes it to appear. I remember, back in the early days of Timbuktu Pro for Mac OS X, that the application suffered from a bug that would cause this “Host Relauncher” application to appear. But this was allegedly fixed in later versions of the software.

I also don’t remember using Timbuktu Pro since I last restarted my computer.

With dual 1.25 GHz G4 processors, I don’t always notice performance degradation right away. After all, even if a process takes up to 90% of the processing power of one CPU, I still have another one available for additional processing. That makes it much harder to identify the source of the problem, i.e. the sequence of actions that might cause this “Host Relauncher” process to appear.

It’s a mystery.


2 Responses to ““Host Relauncher” mystery”

  1. john says:

    its still related to timbuktu
    just kill the process and your okay
    do you have root user enabled in netinfo
    then login as root in the terminal

    succes john

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Oh, I didn’t realize Timbuktu was still involved. They claimed to have fixed the problem a while back.

    I do have root enabled. But I just need to use “sudo” to kill the process.

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