syslogd out of control

Hi, I've got a 20'' Core2Duo Intel iMac (320 GB HD, 4 GB RAM, ATI 2600HD, 10.7.2) and a few days ago I noticed it would suddenly start beach balling and eventually freezing until I had to force reboot. Naturally I opened Activity Monitor to see what was up, and found the process syslogd was eating up nearly all of the CPU. After googling it, I found out it's a rather common issue and basically something is filling the Console log with a boatload of errors. The advice I found was to check out the size of the log, since people said sometimes syslogd can get out of control and cause huge log files to be created. Mine are hardly large and less than 1 MB. The most common problem I found online was sometimes Time Machine can cause syslogd to go crazy, so I disabled time machine and rebooted, even unplugged my external drive, but syslogd still starts murdering the CPU after about 30 mins to 1 hour of just being idle with no apps open. I tried to identify anything useful in Console, but there are so many errors I can't even begin to guess what could be causing this. It will even beach ball then freeze at the login window, so it's not something user account specific. Also sometimes my wireless will drop before things start deteriorating, so could it be something with airport? In Console, something called airportd appeared loads of times in the system.log file, so for all I know that could be related...

So! Could someone please tell me what information from Console is the most valuable that I could post here, or let me know what sort of errors I should be looking for in Console? Thanks a tons, I wicked don't wan't to reinstall and from what I could tell online a simple Terminal command is the solution.

Last thing, the only recent alterations I made was downloading Steam, but that was working fine for a while after I downloaded it. (I thought maybe Steam's sneaky login item it installs without really telling you was responsible, but I have since deleted every piece of Steam I was able to find using Spotlight and syslogd is still being wacky.

Thanks, wow just as I was poking around Console to post an example, this eff-load of errors appeared in Console:


Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: failed to parse embedded CMap.
Dec 15 19:28:20 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[320]: *** process 320 exceeded 500 log message per second limit - remaining messages this second discarded ***
Dec 15 19:28:23 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[311]: ImageIO: <ERROR>
Dec 15 19:28:23 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[311]: PNG P[E9][83][FD]: invalid chunk type
Dec 15 19:28:35 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[311]: I/O
Dec 15 19:28:35 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[311]: error : encoder error
Dec 15 19:28:35 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[311]: I/O error : encoder error
Dec 15 19:28:36: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Dec 15 19:28:36 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[311]: I/O
Dec 15 19:28:36 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[311]: error : encoder error
Dec 15 19:28:36 Jeromes-iMac com.apple.mdworker.pool.0[311]: I/O error : encoder error


The internets tell me that mdworker is Spotlight... what would cause Spotlight to start freaking out? Also... I expected syslogd to kick into high gear upon these Console entries and start beachballing. but Activity Monitor shows everything running smoothly. wtf!

d00d... thank you so much. syslogd is being good for now since I put my hd on the privacy list, but Im afraid to let it reindex in case it causes errors again! i was this close to reinstalling and now i don't have to, woo hoo i'll prob turn spotlight back on after a few days or something

Well it seems that didn't do the trick... I kept getting more crashes and max CPU usage, especially when waking up from sleep. I decided to wipe the hd and reinstall, and things are even worse... Here is a picture I took since I couldn't take a screenshot. I opened Safari and suddenly 4 Web Process icons appeared in the dock, and when I tried to open activity monitor using spotlight the menu turned white and so did the volume indicator.. What the #$%@! This is after a new install of 10.7.2.... I thought maybe my hd is dying, but its SMART status is still verified. I feel like this is a crazy bug in 10.7.2 that causes some process to go wacky and not necessarily a hardware issue. I can only hope that 10.7.3 addresses the problem : (

Yes I have boot into safe mode but I never used it in that mode long enough to see if any processes max out... I wiped and reinstalled one more time and am not installing anything else so I'm going to see if it's something specific to OS X...

I also have quite a few errors in Console mentioning usbmuxd which looks like it belongs to iTunes syncing... I'll keep wifi syncing off and see if those go down at all. Thanks Intell!