xClient process consuming CPU -- what is it?

Question

Basic question, I can't find anything on Google about it. There's a process that keeps my fans spinning, and consumes about 80% cpu.

xClient -- what is it, or how can I find out more about it?

Answer 1

Open Activity Monitor and sort by CPU. Then select the item and click the information icon (circle with a lower case i)

Then you can see all the open files and ports. That should give you a ton of system files that make no sense, but you should get a path to the file or some details to post if you can't figure out straight away where it's located and what files it's reading. (Worst case upload the files to a GitHub gist or pastebin and link to me in the comments below)

Answer 2

What xClient is

I also see this running about once day. This is likely part of the "Snow Inventory Client".

After getting the Process ID (PID) - let's say it's 11211, I ran this (note that the $ is the prompt and not part of the command)

$ sudo lsof -p 11211

and two of the items displayed are:

• /usr/local/bin/xMetering
• /Library/Application Support/Snow Software

Googling for xClient and xMetering brings up a PDF describing the Snow Inventory Client. The configuration file (/etc/snowclient.conf) mentioned in the PDF also exists on my system, with a SiteID being my company's name.

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Managing its High CPU usage

xClient is a CPU hog. I use cputhrottle to limit it, which can be installed via Homebrew.

Example usage. Suppose xClient's PID is 11211 and you want it to take no more than 10% of CPU (on average). You'd run this in a Terminal:

$ sudo cputhrottle 11211 10

Note that this is 10% of a single CPU core. The cputhrottle command will keep running until the throttled process (in this case, xClient) exits.