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OS X Mavericks kernel_task eating 100% CPU
- bpicolo 13y agoThat explains why my Mac has been crazy sluggish lately...
- EpicEng 13y agoI noticed slowdown on my brand new Air with nothing installed (beside a browser, xcode, and VLC). I have to reboot multiple times per day, closing the lid doesn't help, it causes it. Really unacceptable and a lot of people are seeing the same thing. I'll be regretting not going with a Lenovo until they fix this.
- _delirium 13y agoCould also be other issues unless you see this specific set of symptoms. Mine gets sluggish but it seems to have something to do with the 'systemstats' process. When I open up something that queries it (e.g. click on the power icon in the menu bar to make it go to "Collecting power usage information...", or open Activity Monitor), it goes nuts, pegging the CPU and ballooning to >2GB of memory. Haven't figured out what to do about that, besides kill -9'ing it and avoiding doing anything that'll cause it to respawn.
- _delirium 13y agoReply to self, in case anyone comes across this: Moving the /private/var/db/systemstats directory out of the way and rebooting seems to have solved the problem. Guess something there was corrupt or too large.
- majke 13y agoWorkaround: - First. stop playing music (in your browser, itunes or whatever). - Next wait 5 minutes - Last, close lid (go to sleep) and open again again. Works for me. My biggest problem is that my mac freezes once a day.
- raverbashing 13y agoSo, Apple installed PulseAudio?
- EpicEng 13y agoClosing the lid (sleeping) is what is causing it for many people (myself included). I just have to leave it open or reboot.
- NoPiece 13y agoMy Mac freezes a few times a week. Just the window manager, because I can still ssh in. I know it isn't the lid, because it is an iMac, but it may be going to sleep that kills it.
- threeseed 13y agoDoes your computer get hot ? Because the only cause of Mac's freezing are pretty serious hardware issues.
- rjzzleep 13y agoi posted a real fix below. sadly this fix the one you mentioned doesn't always work for me. also, usually i wouldn't notice that the bug happened until my battery was half drained
- plg 13y agoMaybe you're holding it wrong. #antennagate
- coldtea 13y agoAntennagate? You mean that old non-issue blown up by some media out of all proportion, that happened to phones before and since (including competitors phones), and despite which "issue" the iPhone 4 went on to sell further tens of millions of devices with the same design? No, I think unlike that, this is a real problem.
- plg 13y agoman, you guys/gals have no sense of humour
- nemothekid 13y agoI've been wrestling this as well, and found this post too. Another problem I frequently wrestle with is my air sleeping on not coming back (the keyboard stays lit though). Only way to get it back is too reboot.
- yellowbkpk 13y agoThis, along with my wifi connection dying every hour or two (requiring a restart) makes me wish I had never upgraded to Mavericks. Link to wifi discussion: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5535320 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5535320
- cpeterso 13y agoThanks for the link. I have the same Wi-Fi flakiness. :(
- Auguste 13y agoI've had this problem with all my Macs at home, although it would never occur with other Wi-Fi access points. This leads me to believe it has something to do with the wireless access point itself. I was never able to fix the problem, but it went away after I bought an AirPort Time Capsule, which now serves as my wireless router. It has an extremely limited feature set compared to a real router, but I haven't had connection problems once since implementing it.
- yellowbkpk 13y agoDo you use a bluetooth keyboard? My wifi flakiness seems to be much less of a problem when my lid is open and I'm typing on the builtin keyboard than when the lid is closed and I'm using the Apple bluetooth keyboard. It's so intermittent that it's very hard to diagnose, but that's one thing I've noticed.
- Auguste 13y agoNo, I don't have a bluetooth keyboard. On the Macbooks I use the built-in. On the iMac I use a wired keyboard.
- ktsmith 13y agoThe wifi problem drives me absolutely nuts. Most of the time I'm somewhere I can use a wired connection but the lack of a solution is incredibly frustrating.
- shurcooL 13y agoI've had no problems with my MBP for the last 2+ years. Happy user here.
- raverbashing 13y agoI gave up on Mavericks after it went on an irreparable rampage of asking me for a "keychain password", then after trying a fix it just wouldn't boot anymore. It required me to recover using Time Machine (and had a lot of workarounds, because it can't recover booting from the recovery partition in the HD, sigh)
- pacomerh 13y agoI had the same issue with the keychain and repaired permissions on files to fix the issue.
- raverbashing 13y agoYeah, this might have helped. The solution I tried involved changing some files in /Library/Keychains, but it didn't work And the worse thing is that after that, a disk scan (using the Recovery boot) showed some errors on the HD, but these were non-recoverable
- andrewfree 13y agoIf you boot into recovery drive and go under Utilities -> Terminal type 'resetpassword' and in that same window there will be a ACL ( OS X Access Control Lists ) reset for an account. If you do that when you reboot, it prompts you to make a new keychain before logging you in.
- wxm 13y agoSolution on a late 2013 MBP for me (when the issue occurs no sound is playing anymore - no system sounds, no videos, no audio): Plugging in earphones and unplugging. Killing the coreaudio process as recommended at a few places online doesn't do the trick, unfortunately.
- stevewillows 13y agoI had an issue with mavericks on an old early 2008 MBP - - mavericks nearly cooked the computer on a fresh install.
- moon_princess 13y agosomeone in the discussion suggests using the Mountain Lion AppleHDA.kext: https://discussions.apple.com/message/23659683#23659683 https://discussions.apple.com/message/23659683#23659683 i'd rather download a kernel extension from something a little more official than a some random guy's first post, though...
- alimoeeny 13y agoProblems I have, on a brand new 15 retina MBPro: 1- after wake from sleep, wifi needs to be turned off and on to find anything 2- no sound from internal or external speaker until restart, although the OS behaves as nothing is wrong, the onscreen indicators and system preferences act as if they are muting and unmuting and changing the volume 3- kernel panics every now and then 4- display jitters (like graphic buffer corruption) a couple of times 5- after wake up from sleep , keyboard does not respond while track pad is, which means I cannot login, needs force shutdown,
- pudquick 13y ago"on a brand new 15 retina MBPro" You have a warranty. Use it. Complaints here do not solve your problems. If Apple cannot solve your problems, within the terms if your warranty, they will offer alternatives (eventually) - up to and including a refund. I understand people want to raise issues to "public awareness" that they feel are something Apple should pay attention to. And in the case of the original submission, VERY SPECIFIC details were figured out - and Bug Reported to Apple! Apple even closed some of the reports as a duplicate. They know about this problem - and it's for a new OS that has only been out for a handful of months - and the issue is for specific hardware builds. They are working on it. You, however, have a laundry list of real issues - USE YOUR WARRANTY.
- coldtea 13y agoSome of those (minor) problems, in fact most, are the standard kind of "new OS" bugs. None of them sounds like its about hardware faults. So your advice is not really applicable here. He'd better wait for 10.9.2 and such.
- pudquick 13y agoMy advice is 100% applicable. Especially with issue #5, but in general as well. You don't seem to understand: He is unhappy with what he purchased because he is experiencing problems that should not exist in the product. A brand new product. And not just a single issue - but several of them! This isn't a device that (in his personal experience) worked fine at some point in the past on a different version of software but now is having problems on the latest software update. This is a device that, brand new from Apple, has problems. This point is especially relevant as you cannot downgrade a Mac from Apple to an OS version that came out prior to the introduction of that specific model of machine. The Late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina devices shipped with Mavericks. They will never run Mountain Lion, you cannot avoid Mavericks on them for the time being. This is the entire point of a warranty (and lemon laws in many locations): You don't have to "wait" for something you just bought to get better / work properly. You take it back and show them the problems you're having. Either they can fix it or they can't. If they can't fix it, he can get his money back or some other alternative offered by Apple that he might agree to (maybe a different model, or a complete replacement). His money is not trapped in this device, so he doesn't have to put up with this experience - unless he actually prefers to complain and be unhappy.
- code_duck 13y agoI had a strange problem appear after I spilled tea on my 2010 MBP last year. Continually, kernel_task was using an entire core (150-250% in top) and no amount of reboots could fix this. The built-in hardware diagnostic indicated it was not compatible with my Mac, and I could find nothing else that apparently was wrong. My computer was running very slowly though, and the system load was always over 4. Finally I found through research that this is somehow related to power management. Apparently the system will have the CPU loop simple operations to prevent the processor from doing actual work and heating up. Sure enough, disabling power management by hacking a kernel extension made the kernel_task problem go away. My Mac has run perfectly for three months ever since I made that fix, after being nearly disabled for a year.
- Moto7451 13y agoI remember having this same problem on a hackintosh. Installing the NullPowerManagement kext was the usual fix back then since DSDT patches were brand new and not well known by the community. If that kext is still available and compatible with 10.9 it's probably a good way to handle this until they fix it.
- cliveowen 13y agoDamn, my 2009 Macbook has been running very slowly for the past 4 months or so and no amount of rebooting would resolve the problem. I was actually puzzled when it slowed down to a crawl becoming basically useless and would even restart with the same slowness. Could you elaborate on your fix?
- xjtian 13y agoI've been running into this problem with my 2013 MBA. It happens on wake, and the only that fixes it is a reboot. I'm getting pretty fed up with the issue since it's tanking my battery life and there seems like nothing I can do to fix it permanently.
- tokanizar 13y agoIn my opinion, Mavericks is the worst OS X version so far. It's caused a handful of crashes/hangs to my Macbook Pro, which I only encountered with about once or twice a year with Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion. I'm not sure it is caused by the OS itself or the compatibility of the apps I installed, but it's still bad. I just had a crash few mins ago after I reinstalled the OS entirely last week. According to the crash log, it has something to do with the "kernel_task". That sucks!
- k2enemy 13y agoEach major release of OS X, I know that I should wait until the x.1 release, but I get excited and install the x.0 release anyway. And every release, the same thing happens. Tons of bugs, crashes, and frustration and I swear that next release I'll wait until x.1.
- tokanizar 13y agoI guess it would be a wise move. However, we are in 10.9.1 right now and the problem doesn't seem to be gone. Sighhh...
- wonderzombie 13y agoMan, am I just insanely lucky? I've never had such trouble with x.0 releases, during the upgrade or after. FWIW, I've used at least 2 Macs concurrently since '09, and one since '06.
- tokanizar 13y agoI guess. I saw that most of the time people did complain about the first releases of the OS. I didn't get most of those problem, though, until Mavericks.
- pohl 13y agoI'm with you. Probably most users are, too. People who aren't experiencing these problems have no need to inhabit threads like these.
- 13y ago
- rjzzleep 13y agoguys there's a fix. i have a 2013 mba. the problem is in applehda. you can look at the hpet shoot up after sleep using `powermetrics` here's a video to reproduce the issue http://youtu.be/Q8OqdMq98j4 http://youtu.be/Q8OqdMq98j4 and here's a dmg that has the fix. basically it replaces applehda with the one from 10.8.5 http://puu.sh/5RBvj.dmg http://puu.sh/5RBvj.dmg i've been using it happily for ten days. some people claimed it wouldn't work with haswell, but it does for me. YMMV though
- ics 13y agoI experienced this right out of the gate after upgrading. I was very curious to see what my battery savings would be and decided to ditch my charger, only to have my battery gone in an hour. It's since subsided– I'm not really sure why, though at one point I did about everything I could think of short of reinstalling. I removed all kernel extensions I had added (KR4MB for example), removed SIMBL, reset PRAM, cycled the battery, etc. Now the only issue I have is about 10s after closing the lid, the fan goes nuts for another 10s before going to sleep. Edit: Spring 2011 MacBook Pro.
- toyg 13y agoMy personal list of gripes (1st-gen 15" MBPr) is short, but it's sad that they all appeared after the Mavericks upgrade: 1. wifi will fail to reconnect on wake. 2. almost 40% of RAM (about 6 GB of 16) in use right after boot with no apps running. Was about 15% before Mavericks. 3. I got the dreadful Keychain error once, luckily managed to fix it (I use FileVault, so no SafeBoot for me and losing the key would have been fairly disastrous). All these very clearly appeared after I took the plunge and moved to 10.9.1. Somebody screwed up.
- lukasm 13y agoSame problems. Have to plug and unplug headphones. to fix kernel_task
- nikanj 13y agoOn mine, unplugging the external screen for a while fixes everything http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kppD1PotFw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kppD1PotFw
- kybernetyk 13y agoThis bug appeared for me after the update to 10.9.1 (from 10.9) on my 2013 MBA.
- broabprobe 13y agoyup, also have this bug. It remedies itself after a minute or two.
- VeejayRampay 13y agoAny other company that would DARE completely ignore the cries for help of its consumers would be publicly shamed and their reputation would suffer. Yet, not a single word in this thread about how silent they tend to be about issues effecting thousands of users (which is a common trend with them)... I wonder how they manage to pull that off, it's magic.
- sitharus 13y agoReally? Name one non open-source company that will jump on forum threads and fix it, rather than just putting it in their internal bug tracker to investigate. I have a Logitech gaming keyboard. Their drivers are shockingly bad and freeze up every so often requiring me to re-plug the keyboard to get them to to work again. This is mentioned in the forums for at least 6 months, no fix has been announced. I'm not defending Apple here, they should at least comment on their own forums, but they're not alone.
- larrys 13y agoBack in the day, when there was no internet (only the arpanet) and Unix systems shipped with 10 manuals in nicely bound cases (I had one I was in my 20's at the time) things moved much slower and a vendor would never consider acting like this because they served primarily business customers (and institutions). Just the memory on my first Unix system was like $4000 a MB. It came with a 70mb hard disk. To me the change most likely came around 1981 when the IBM PC came out and was sold to consumers who basically believed that it was them that was stupid and not something wrong with the machine. Manufacturers then learned that they could shove things into the pipeline and fix them later and that they actually got a fair amount of slack in the marketplace from the "stupid" end users. People who knew their shit using these machines were totally outnumbered by computer illiterate people. In other cases the ubiquitous "tech guy" made money because things didn't work so who was he to complain? That's what kept Microsoft in power. The tech guy ecosystem. I'm curious if anyone else agrees at all with my take. Strictly my opinion having been around computers so many years.
- sitharus 13y ago
- dhughes 13y agoAnother (much more) common issue which seems to be related to Mavericks is the Finder problem where clicking Finder results a sudden hang of the system a the spinning colour wheel. I'm fairly new to Apple products (~2 years ago) this is the worst problem so far but I'm surprised at such little feedback from Apple on it.
- jasomill 13y agoNot Mavericks-specific, but Finder is notorious for hanging when mounted volumes become unavailable or unreliable. And it's certainly possible that some of the network filesystem changes in Mavericks — in particular, it now uses SMB in certain cases where previous versions would have defaulted to AFP — could lead to this behavior in situations where you didn't see it before.
- znep 13y agoUnrelated to this particular issue, but lately Adobe Updater has taken to running lsof in a tight loop, waiting for me to exit Acrobat so it can update. Makes for a pretty solid red bar of system CPU use.
- wickedlogic 13y agoIt's related to the audio driver and is triggered most frequently when you close the laptop with headphones in. Simply unplug them, close the laptop, and wait for 5-10 seconds. reopen... you will still see the cpu spike, but it will end within a few seconds of everything awaking... it is annoying, but this seems to resolve it for now.
- taterbase 13y agoOne key thing that I've noticed consistently is this happens when I have my headphones plugged in. Unplug them, put it back to sleep and wake it.