Showing posts with label access. Show all posts
Showing posts with label access. Show all posts

securityd memory hogging

Mac running slow, Keychain keeps telling me Google Desktop has changed and asks for authentication. Do I have a virus, or is something wrong with keychain?

Activity Monitor tells me that securityd is using 1.5GB of memory; something is wrong.

Googling suggests that /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase may be corrupted. Furthermore, it seems that it can rebuild itself, so the lizard's tail treatment is suggested: remove the offending part.

I did the following:

cd /var/db
sudo rm -rf CodeEquivalenceDatabase

sudo rm -rf is serious magic, and can get you in serious trouble; be careful (long ago, I once did cd /dev ; rm -rf mouse * — where I meant mouse* — don't try this at home) ... the faint-of-heart could take a copy of the file instead and remove it later:
mv CodeEquivalenceDatabase CodeEquivalenceDatabase.old

In any case, this seemed to work. After a restart keychain asks me to authenticate access for various apps: SystemUIServer, GoogleDesktopAgent, Mail, ... I do this. Everything seems normal, and securityd is using "only" 28MB of memory (back in the old days, we used to run serious theorem provers in less).