10.8.2 - mdworker: Unable to talk to lsboxd

Having the same issue

Symptoms:
- extremely slow spotlight indexing and frequent reindexing
- extremely slow Time Machine backups

4.19.13 1:53:57.289 PM mdworker[5305]: Unable to talk to lsboxd
4.19.13 1:53:57.295 PM mdworker[5304]: Unable to talk to lsboxd
4.19.13 1:53:57.302 PM mdworker[5303]: Unable to talk to lsboxd
4.19.13 1:53:58.376 PM sandboxd[5309]: ([5305]) mdworker(5305) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd
4.19.13 1:53:59.209 PM sandboxd[5309]: ([5304]) mdworker(5304) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd
4.19.13 1:54:00.046 PM sandboxd[5309]: ([5303]) mdworker(5303) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd

After a year

I find this thread.

Wake from sleep (that never happens) battery drain, and a console log plagued with every error in this thread.

3 Genius bar appts, and no effect. Battery dies in 5 days or less (lid closed in my briefcase).

Calling apple again this afternoon.

Edit/Add:
Replaced unit @ local store. Bad SSD- genius actually looked at the console this time.

petsounds said:

If I filter system.log by 'lsboxd', I get the "unable to talk..." message basically every 2-4 minutes.

Click to expand...

I've been trying to figure out what is causing various games to stutter/pause every couple of minutes and after finding this in my console system log every couple of minutes, I'm suspecting it MIGHT just have something to do with it. The problem with the Safe Mode reboot suggestions is that Safe Mode apparently doesn't work right on machines that have gone to software RAID0 arrays to increase speed (e.g. I RAID0 my two internal hard drives on my Mac Mini and use a bootable external backup instead of recovery partition, but trying to boot to Safe Mode results in a kernel panic. Just lovely. Apple's own software that supports RAID0 results in a broken Safe Mode on top of the known lack of support for a recovery partition.

Even so, it seems like the reboot still did something since the log spamming has stopped for the past hour at least. I still need to see if gaming has improved at all. But like people have been saying, WTF isn't Apple actually fixing reported bugs? They force sandboxing on people and they can't even get their own programs to work right with it...sad. Just sad. It's like depreciating Carbon all those years and yammering on about Cocoa, but not supporting it in their own programs like iTunes for years on end. They have their priorities all screwed up since the iPhone came out and frankly, I think it's been a BAD thing.

Sure iOS and the iPhone/iPad made Steve Jobs rich as hell before he died and made Apple stock sore to an all-time-high beyond anyone's wildest dreams, but that dream has been dropping like a stone for some time now and there is no way they can deliver that level of hype again unless they invent mind control computing or something equally wild. It's unsustainable and has created completely unrealistic expectations for the future. This hurts Apple's long term image and drives them even further off into the iOS oblivion they've created. Some of us still prefer traditional computing BY FAR and this tablet/smart phone craze is all but ruining the traditional computer market which despite all the hype for mobile, still blow the freaking doors off any POS phone or tablet out there. But good luck getting proper support for them. Companies are too busy trying to catch the latest FAD instead of moving forward properly with a stable OS. Apple is so quick to drop support for OLDER STABLE OS versions, but they replace it with UNSTABLE CRAP THEY WON'T FIX. This is unacceptable. The problem is there aren't many other solutions since Microsoft now can't move fast enough to drive Windows into a new Oblivion as well. They took a relatively ugly, but STABLE Windows7 and made the patch-quilt NIGHTMARE that is Windows8. Horrible. Just Horrible looking. There is NO up-to-date STABLE modern Windows operating system out there (don't even mention Linux; it's god-awful and always will be; I've been toying with it for over a decade and it STILL SUCKS for software installation, forcing groups to maintain software archives everywhere for their particular flavor and making things like Steam ONLY work for ONE system...Ubuntu which has sucked to high hell ever since the newest Gnome came out and ruined its own GUI. You get half-baked support for KDE there, but other flavors of Linux don't get supported by this and that company like Steam. It's a mess).

MagnusVonMagnum said:

Sure iOS and the iPhone/iPad made Steve Jobs rich as hell before he died and made Apple stock sore to an all-time-high beyond anyone's wildest dreams, but that dream has been dropping like a stone for some time now...

Click to expand...

I've tried the Safe Reboot thing and the gremlins always return after a short time.

As for your rant, while I agree with much of it, you'll have a better chance of changing things by sending a more composed e-mail with your thoughts to Tim Cook (tcook@apple), as AFAIK he doesn't browse the MacRumors forum. I sent an e-mail to him suggesting he put Ive in charge of both hardware and software design a few months before he actually did so, and while I doubt my e-mail had a big impact on that decision, I'd like to hope it had some impact.

petsounds said:

I've tried the Safe Reboot thing and the gremlins always return after a short time.

Click to expand...

Actually, since my "failed" Safe Reboot, the lsboxd error has disappeared (I guess Safe Mode doesn't have to successfully fully load in order to do whatever it does to get rid of that error). I still get the "deny mach-lookup com.apple.coresymbolicationd" in the log, but it only happens every few hours, not every 20 seconds to 1 minute like it was doing before.

In any case, it had no impact on pause/stutters in Call of Duty 2. Booting from my external backup USB3 drive instead and playing it off that drive resulted in a big improvement in that regard (still pauses but so short that you'd likely miss it if you weren't specifically looking for it constantly whereas with the RAID0 configuration, the pause is anywhere from 1/8 to 1/2 second and can be very noticeable during the game. Clearly, there's something going on with software RAID that impacts the game (on the plus side, the missions, etc. load over twice as fast). I seem to recall something similar happening during The Force Unleashed, but I don't recall it being as noticeable. I was playing Monkey Island 4 (Escape From Monkey Island) in a virtual WinXP environment and Curse of Monkey Island with ScummVM and they would both also pause for a split second so I'm thinking something pretty nasty is happening in the background to affect games like that. With everyday Internet and server functions, it's unnoticeable and the boot time and other copy operations, etc. are massively faster with RAID0 (2.5x on average) than with the regular single drive operation using the stock 5200 RPM drives (they top out about 100MB/sec whereas with RAID0 they top out at 250MB/sec).

As for e-mailing Tim Cook, I seriously doubt he reads his outside e-mails. They're most likely filtered by a secretary or something first. Otherwise, he'd probably be overwhelmed with every form of begging, pleading, lecturing and insults known to man. Given his personal lack of interest in Macs (he commented he hardly ever uses them anymore in preference to the iPad), I doubt he'd even have a clue what was being said anyway. I'd rather e-mail someone in the OSX development department. Of course, bug reports, etc. are supposed to go there, but I think they get filtered by tech people that don't know squat (kind of like Apple Store "geniuses" that typically give a bad meaning to the word).

I've had 10.8.4 running for about eight hours now (installed via combo update), and it appears to have have partially fixed my issues. I no longer am getting sandboxd[296] ([299]): mdworker(299) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd and kernel[0]: Sandbox: sandboxd(314) deny mach-lookup com.apple.coresymbolicationd messages.

I've only gotten one mdworker[299]: Unable to talk to lsboxd message during that time.

petsounds said:

I've only gotten one mdworker[299]: Unable to talk to lsboxd message during that time.

Click to expand...

Similar results here with 10.8.4. Let's hope the crap has been finally neutered.

I've concluded this issue (which has not come back since my "failed" boot into Safe Mode) has nothing to do with stuttering in games, etc. That seems to be a result purely of the hard drive controller driver somehow interrupting things in a very bad way (less pervasive but still present when I boot from an external USB3 drive than my internal RAID 0 SATA setup).

However, using a trick I read about on some Diablo III forum, I bought a USB3 32GB memory stick and now when I want to play a game that has a hard drive related stuttering issue, I just copy the game directory over to the USB3 drive and run it from there (e.g. Call of Duty keeps its save files in my home directory, not in the game install directory so it doesn't interfere at all to just copy it to the USB stick and run from there). It plays 100% smooth as ice from the USB drive with zero stuttering.

So whatever this error is caused by, it appears to be a minor thing here. It wasn't causing any of my stutter issues and I have not seen it return since the boot into Safe Mode that resulted in a kernel panic (seemed to fix it anyway).

For what it's worth, on my 10.8.4, I made the observation that all the
[0]: Sandbox: mdworker(1298) deny file-read-data
messages are for legacy files such as old PPC-only apps or files with resource forks (like old fonts).

That said, Spotlight has no need to search inside obsolete application bundles -- and it can still find them, even after receiving the sandbox deny.

Just completed the 10.8.4 combo update and have only 2 recent errors

6/8/13 9:26:42.118 AM mds[41]: Unable to talk to lsboxd
6/8/13 9:28:50.894 AM mdworker[372]: Unable to talk to lsboxd

That is it. Not sure what I did but on earlier inspections my log files were littered with these types of messages.

Hoping this silliness has ended for all of us.

Nope

OSX 10.8.4, late 2011 MBP 8GB

Jun 21 17:38:52 macbook-pro mdworker[2350]: Unable to talk to lsboxd
Jun 21 17:40:53 macbook-pro mdworker[2362]: Unable to talk to lsboxd
Jun 21 17:44:54 macbook-pro mdworker[2366]: Unable to talk to lsboxd
Jun 21 17:48:55 macbook-pro mdworker[2378]: Unable to talk to lsboxd

/var/log/system.log is 1.2 GB (!)

From https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4313832?start=45&tstart=0 I tried now this one:

In
/System/Library/Sandbox/Profiles/system.sb

Add 2 lines in bold:

;;; Allow IPC to standard system agents.
(allow mach-lookup
(global-name "com.apple.bsd.dirhelper")
(global-name "com.apple.system.logger")
(global-name "com.apple.system.notification_center")
(global-name "com.apple.system.opendirectoryd.libinfo")
(global-name "com.apple.system.DirectoryService.libinfo_v1")
(global-name "com.apple.system.opendirectoryd.membership")
(local-name "com.apple.ls.boxd")
(global-name "com.apple.ls.boxd")
(global-name "com.apple.xpcd"))


Let's see.