For the last few days, I’ve noticed my Mac getting slower, and slower, and slower. To the point where my mouse was jerking about all over the place, and where I was considering smashing my head against the wall next to me.
Opening up Activity Monitor showed that the syslogd and mount_hfs processes were hogging up both of my CPU cores. One each. The greedy bastards.
A little googling, and I found that deleting the file /var/log/asl.db seems to solve the problem. So far, my Mac seems to be speeding along quite merily now, but I’ll give it a few days before confirming mission accomplished.
- Restart your Mac.
- When at the login screen, enter your password, then hold down shift and login. This will prevent your startup items from launching.
Open Terminal.app and enter the following (at your own risk!!):
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd sudo rm /var/log/asl.db sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogdLogout, and then log back in again.
Update: That didn’t last long :( It had been zipping along so much faster, but it just started happening again. I’m trying to restart now, but I’ve just got the spinner on screen, and fear that I’m now going to have to force power off. I hope my Drobo turns up asap so I can have a decent backup of my stuff.