Lion : helpd process eating RAM

[Franciturci]

Hallo everybody. I have recently upgraded to Lion on my 2009 Unibody Macbook. Now the 2 giga of RAM seem not enough because randomly but very often an unkown process helpd starts and eats up 300 MB of memory.

It seems that such a process is related to the help documentation (it should be an "help daemon") but i don't know why should it be that memory hungry.

I'm often forced to just kill it using Activity Monitor, but it doesn't seem to be an elegant solution for the best operating system in the world, does it?

 

[Mrguidogenio]

In the past days I have noticed this hungry process too, but now it doesn't appear anymore (don't know why)

 

[paulsalter]

i noticed it this morning, it ran for about 5 mins and not seen it again

 

[Franciturci]

Actually for me it's a serious issue. Today I had it at least 4 times, reaching 900 MB (almost a half of my total RAM), making the system unusable. If I check the deaiks in the info panel of the activity monitor, i get the following:

/
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/HelpData.framework/Versions/A/Resources/helpd
/usr/share/icu/icudt46l.dat
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/HelpData.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Helpbook Plugin.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Helpbook Plugin
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SemanticDocumentManagement.framework/Versions/A/SemanticDocumentManagement
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MPWXmlCore.framework/Versions/A/MPWXmlCore
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/HelpData.framework/Versions/A/Resources/KB Plugin.bundle/Contents/MacOS/KB Plugin
/private/var/folders/ly/74f_7kk970q1sv329b7l0qmr0000gn/C/mds/mdsDirectory.db
/Users/Franci/Library/Keychains/Microsoft_Intermediate_Certificates
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/XQuery.framework/Versions/A/XQuery
/private/var/db/mds/messages/se_SecurityMessages
/Users/Franci/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
/Library/Keychains/System.keychain
/System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain
/usr/lib/dyld
/private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64
/dev/null
->0xffffff80082e4180
->0xffffff80082e4180
/Users/Franci/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpd/Cache.db
count=1, state=0x2
/Users/Franci/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpd/Cache.db
FNetwork.defaultStorageSession
->0xffffff80083220c8
->0xffffff8008283068
/Users/Franci/Library/Preferences/SDMHelpData/Other/Italian/fileAttributes
/dev/random
/dev/random
/Users/Franci/Library/Preferences/SDMHelpData/Other/Italian/lsm_map
->0xffffff80085c6328

Which kind of support may I have from apple in your opinion?

 

[alexkrishnan]

I'm having the same problem, helpd regularly eats up half a gig of ram or more, and several times a day it will use up 100% of my cpu and make my fans spin wild when I am otherwise not using my mac very heavily. Seems like a really obvious and annoying bug in Lion.

 

[mrapplegate]

Actually for me it's a serious issue. Today I had it at least 4 times, reaching 900 MB (almost a half of my total RAM), making the system unusable. If I check the deaiks in the info panel of the activity monitor, i get the following:
...
Which kind of support may I have from apple in your opinion?

Send them feedback.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Unfortunately with bugs, not everyone has them. I see 24MB of usage, not the 900 or more MB usage you and some others see. My process goes away after a bit after viewing the help pages for apps.

 

[Franciturci]

At the moment my only solution has been to stop the daemon using Lingon, loosing access to all the support pages. I also sent feedback to Apple, but I don't know whether a solution is going to come...

 

[jasonnm]

Problems with helpd too, but...

I'm having problems with this process too, but I haven't yet seen if it's eating all my RAM. My problem is that it keeps crashing!
It happened for the first time yesterday, and so far today it has happened 3 times... not sure why, as I can't decipher the crash log...

Hope Apple fixes this quickly - a lot of people seem to be having similar problems.

 

[timrichardson]

helpd is crashing constantly for me

It's crashing many times per day for me
helpd

 

[arkmannj]

helpd is also causing issues here, I'm also noticing (using little snitch) that it is constantly connecting to help.apple.com and at one point it initiated a connection to intuit.com and I didn't have any intuit software running, (infact I haven't since last tax season.)

I'm also seeing problems on accounts that have parental controls enabled with the webproxyd process, it will "randomly" decide to block all wab traffic for that user even if they have unrestricted web access. We have a script setup to kill & restart the process that users can run, and that seems to be getting them by for now but really is not an ideal solution.

 

[reubs]

Glad I saw this. I've got the same process trying to connect the Potion Factory's secure site frequently, even though I have no apps from PF running.

It's an annoying thing, and the guys at PF won't get back in touch with me about it, either.

I'm happy to see that I'm not alone with this irritating glitch that seems to be popping up.

 

[QuestionSanity]

helpd is also causing issues here, I'm also noticing (using little snitch) that it is constantly connecting to help.apple.com and at one point it initiated a connection to intuit.com and I didn't have any intuit software running, (infact I haven't since last tax season.)

Any news on this issue? I have the same issue with "Getsprouted.com" constantly wanting access, and I've never had their programs as far as I can tell.

 

[Whizzbizz]

helpd, hiutil and mdworker seem to update indexes (HelpViewer and Spotlight). This takes some minutes and then stops - at least if everything works fine. Had it this morning after user login (OSX 10.7.2), that's why I'm here.

(I'm wondering why neither Spotlight nor HelpViewer ever find what I'm looking for ...But that's a different issue.)

 

[yawns]

helpd, hiutil and mdworker seem to update indexes (HelpViewer and Spotlight). This takes some minutes and then stops - at least if everything works fine. Had it this morning after user login (OSX 10.7.2), that's why I'm here.

(I'm wondering why neither Spotlight nor HelpViewer ever find what I'm looking for ...But that's a different issue.)

Yes, helpd indexes help files. If you "uninstall," software by just dragging the .app to the trash, you probably have left over stuff in the help cache/plist. Maybe people have trouble with helpd are seeing it run into a problem trying to update the cache for something that doesn't exist anymore, or something that's left over from an SL upgrade to Lion. Or maybe the cache is just corrupt.

As far as I know, the cache is completely stored in ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpd/ (but there might be stuff elsewhere. Ask google to confirm...)

If you move everything in there to the trash (don't delete it just yet) and let helpd re-index (give it some time to work), that might help. It should quit when it finishes, then only occasionally, briefly run to update.