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I have been troubleshooting why my Mac Mini is running slow and stumbled upon this:

enter image description here

The memory usage is in the GB!

On my MacBook the two processes take under 10 MB together.

Why are these procs taking up so much memory, and how can I fix it to resemble usage on my MacBook?

Mac Mini Server (Late 2012)

  • Mem 4GB
  • OS X Yosemite 10.10.2
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what happens when you kill them +restart ? – Buscar웃 Apr 1 '15 at 21:00
    
@Buscar웃 A restart provides temporary relief. – BAR Apr 2 '15 at 13:41
    
Look in Parent processes and take a Sample (in Activity Monitor) that might show why. Also start in Safe mode to exclude 3d party apps doing that. – Buscar웃 Apr 2 '15 at 16:46
up vote 1 down vote

This is a known issue in Yosemite, although it doesn't affect everyone - I have 5 Macs running Yosemite and one suffers badly, but the others not at all.

Temporary relief comes from rebooting or stopping and restarting the affected services. For discoveryd, in Terminal, do:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.discoveryd.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.discoveryd.plist

Launchervicesd may respond to the same commands - I don't have any experience of that

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1  
"This is a known issue in Yosemite" do you have a reference? I would like to keep track of its status. – BAR Apr 2 '15 at 13:39
    
There's some good info in this and related issues here: link It also comes up in some of the discussions about Yosemite WiFi issues. I've raised BRs with Apple for my instances, and sent diagnostics, but haven't had anything back yet – Nick Apr 3 '15 at 7:40
    
I have this same issue, but it only targets launchservicesd. If I can catch it quickly enough, unloading/loading the daemon helps (though something trips later and locks up the system, requiring a restart anyway). As the OP asks, is there any documentation anywhere about this issue? I've been looking for months with no luck. I've watched launchservicesd go from ~20 MB to 7 GB (and 20+ GB virtual mem!). – Dustin Wheeler Apr 6 '15 at 15:45
1  
I've never found any documentation as such just the link I posted. You'll have seen that there's not a great deal coming up in a Google search either. I assume Apple is aware of, and working on, the issue. I might regret saying this, but I just wiped and rebuilt the Mac that was having the problem and it hasn't recurred in the last 4 days. That makes me think that the cause is a conflict with an older OS X component that isn't properly cleared when updating to a new OS version. The problem Mac is a server, and thus probably handling higher volumes of DNS traffic than a client Mac. – Nick Apr 7 '15 at 16:50
    
Launchservicesd does different things, so there may be different issues here. One suggestion I saw was to rebuild the launch services database (Google for how to do it) - if you've already tried that, sorry – Nick Apr 7 '15 at 16:50

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