process claiming unreasonable amount of memory

[BlueMacawBird]

One of my machines (CMP 5,1) has an issue with a process taking much more memory than appears to be normal. The process is lsd. On my other machines running Mojave this process typically claims about 75MB or less of memory. But on the CMP under discussion lsd ties up something around 4GB plus; I once saw it using 9GB. The amount of memory for this process seems to constantly grow, with the amount low after restart and increasing as the machine runs for days. So it appears that the process is not freeing up memory when it is no longer needed.

Lsd is identified as a root process, although there are also cases where a second iteration is running under my name.

I suspect that I need to reinstall the OS, but wanted to see is there is any known issue causing this problem.

And, can anyone tell me what process lsd is performing?

Thanks

John

 

[dotck]

lsd is the launch service daemon. Check /Library/LaunchDaemons to get an idea which applications are managed by lsd and may be responsible for the excessive memory usage. I'd try removing them one-by-one and check whether the problem persists.

 

[BlueMacawBird]

Thanks, I found four items, three of which were associated with what I gather are old Adobe programs. Since I do not use anything by Adobe at this point I moved them to a temporary folder. The one item I recognized is fo Little Snitch, and I left that. I'll monitor lsd memory usage for a while and provide an update.

 

[BlueMacawBird]

Lsd continues to claim unreasonable amounts of memory. I tried to remove the item for Little Snitch and the system became very slow to restart and I restored that item to the Launchdaemons folder. I want to avoid removing Little Snitch, at least until I can find the preferences file which has been accumulated for it.

I reinstalled Mojave and lsd still eats memory. I saw several iterations of lsd, one under my user name, one under root, and one under the administrator's account (I am not running in the administrators account). Only the root process is consuming unreasonable amounts of memory. I force quit the root process, and shortly after that it reappeared and is slowly building up again.

I inspected the root iteration of lsd and Activity Monitor showed the following details. Note the amount of virtual memory also taken by the process:

I also tried to run purge in the terminal, and it returned the following error:

I'm not sure disk buffers are the real problem here, but I do wonder why purge cannot clear them.

I'll try booting is safe mode shortly, I have not tried that yet.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

 

[BlueMacawBird]

It looks like I got it, I did a clean install of Mojave and migrated the data from a backup. It took several tries before the new copy cured the odd behavior of LSD. That process is now only taking about 25mb, but it still does slowly increase over time. At least it is no longer claiming gigs of memory.