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Apple Core Rot: Logging Spew

My 2013 Mac Pro was running a bit noisy and hot for some hours yesterday even while idle. It is normally whisper quiet and all but inaudible. I have seen that behavior before, and it is always caused by some runaway process doing something useless in the background.

MacOS Sierra has been filled with new bugs, too numerous to contemplate. But the one discussed here is what I call the “logging spew” bug: a continuous stream of logging visible in the Console application, and steadily growing the size on disk of the numerous logging files, all of which are 100% useless to 99.999% of users.

As it turns out, Activity Monitor (in it, View => All Processes) it was logd chewing up a steady 10% of a CPU doing nothing but logging, a few hundred messages per second spewing out. It was some bash process running even after I had quite all Terminal windows. I had to 'kill -9' the process by its process number, but so steady was the logging onslaught that it took a few seconds for console to finish displaying the output. I then rebooted to hope for some sanity.

Yes, you do really need 296 or 3845 CoreSync or whatever update logs in ~/Library/Logs. And thousands of other log files from dozens of processes like that. You will never want to look at these files, nor do you have any use for them, but Apple makes sure to pollute your user folder with them. Don’t get me started on system Logs, which you cannot easily delete, and just build up forever over time, like dental plaque.

Opening Console, you’ll see the ceaseless spew from a cornucopia of processes, including many I never want, and will never use. It might be 'quiet' at times, but what I’ve found is that a number of Apple services get triggered from time to time to go into a state of endless bitching and moaning, often with messages that equate to “fix this bug someday”.

For example, here is this lovely new Apple bug involving touchui. On a Mac Pro no touch user interface exists, but the engineers at Apple don’t bother to test much any more, so the com.apple.nowplayingtouchui apparently is just going to fail forever. The word “idiots” comes to mind. What triggers it I don’t know. Rebooting made this one go away until the next morning—it’s baaaaack, failing every 2 seconds again today. The “0 seconds... respawn” message means that the process is crashing or failing—an obvious bug that should never ship to customers.

Mar  9 21:26:06 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:26:36 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar  9 21:26:36 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:26:45 diglloydMP syslogd[51]: ASL Sender Statistics
Mar  9 21:26:46 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:27:16 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar  9 21:27:16 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:27:46 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar  9 21:27:46 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:28:16 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar  9 21:28:16 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:28:46 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar  9 21:28:46 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:29:16 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar  9 21:29:16 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:29:46 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar  9 21:29:46 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar  9 21:30:16 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar  9 21:30:16 diglloydMP com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.nowplayingtouchui): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.          

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