Catalina - syspolicyd high cpu usage: SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager crashes

[Jeromekem]

Dear forum,

Recently I've been noticing my 'syspolicyd' is taking up extremely high (90-100%) CPU usage at startup on macOS catalina 10.15.7. Lately, it takes half an hour or more and it keeps rescanning. This is new and extremely annoying behaviour for me, so I started to check 'Console.app'. Here I get a crash report of 'SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager' (see pastebin below):

Process: SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager [497]Path: - Pastebin.com

Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.

pastebin.com

In the past I know that I disable update notifications via the terminal commands:

''softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"
and
''
#!/bin/bash
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0
killall Dock
"
(A picture from my console is added too). Do any of you know what can cause this issue and how to tackle this in the future?

Update: For now it seems to be fixed by doing this:
--Running the below terminal command:
"sudo softwareupdate --reset-ignored"
--SMC reset.

Please feel free to still comment, as I'd like to learn from your response (+ it can be interesting for others). Thanks.

Greetings,
Jerome

 

[eelpout]

yep, it's been running like crazy on my 2018 Mac Mini since I upgraded to Monterey 12.3.1. :/

it was complaining about a file called /var/db/DetachedSignatures

a file which DID NOT EXIST for me. heh.

so I did a touch and now it's there, and it seems to be happier. but now I'm getting a lot of errors with "Unable to parse ticket." which means what I'm not sure.

I'll keep your fix in mind as I try to figure this out.

 

[NeonIbis]

yep, it's been running like crazy on my 2018 Mac Mini since I upgraded to Monterey 12.3.1. :/

I had this problem on my 2020 Intel MBA. In my case, the problem was the Monterey installer file (12 GB), which was still in my applications folder. Syspolicyd was scanning it every few minutes! Deleting the file solved the problem. Perhaps worth checking? (I note that the Monterey intaller also downloaded automatically on my other mac...)

Good luck, anyway!

 

[eelpout]

I had this problem on my 2020 Intel MBA. In my case, the problem was the Monterey installer file (12 GB), which was still in my applications folder. Syspolicyd was scanning it every few minutes! Deleting the file solved the problem. Perhaps worth checking? (I note that the Monterey intaller also downloaded automatically on my other mac...)

Good luck, anyway!

Unfortunately, that's not it for me.

Still trying to track down what this "Unable to parse ticket." actually means. This is what is happening over and over again while syspolicyd is churning:

default    10:03:59.371181-0700    syspolicyd    MacOS error: 3
default    10:03:59.372029-0700    syspolicyd    Error checking with notarization daemon: 3
default    10:03:59.375351-0700    syspolicyd    Trust evaluate failure: [leaf TemporalValidity] [ca1 TemporalValidity]
default    10:03:59.380894-0700    syspolicyd    Trust evaluate failure: [leaf TemporalValidity] [ca1 TemporalValidity]
default    10:03:59.388088-0700    syspolicyd    Trust evaluate failure: [leaf TemporalValidity] [ca1 TemporalValidity]
error    10:03:59.390784-0700    syspolicyd    Unable to parse ticket.
error    10:03:59.390798-0700    syspolicyd    error registering ticket: -1
default    10:03:59.390832-0700    syspolicyd    MacOS error: -1
default    10:03:59.391709-0700    syspolicyd    Error registering stapled ticket: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-1 "kCFStreamErrorHTTPParseFailure / kCFSocketError / kCFStreamErrorDomainCustom / kCSIdentityUnknownAuthorityErr / qErr / telGenericError / dsNoExtsMacsBug / kMovieLoadStateError / cdevGenErr: Could not parse the request/response. /  / custom to the kind of stream in question  /  / queue element not found during deletion /  / not a SysErr, just a placeholder  /  / General error; gray cdev w/o alert"

 

[NeonIbis]

I'm sorry to hear it. I'm afraid I have no idea what that means!

My syspolicyd issue started up again, and lo and behold, it turned out the Monterey installer had automatically downloaded again... so I've deleted it again... Very weird as I'm already using Monterey!