Runaway Process using RAM and CPU

[jamesjaan]

I have a runaway process in Yosemite.

It's using around 90% of CPU. My computer is very hot. My battery is drained.

It's also using around 29 GB of RAM / Swap.

I've just done a clean install of Yosemite and it's still there.

Using a 2014 MacBook Air 1.4 / 8GB

I've attached two screenshot of the process.

 

[simonsi]

Well its using 90% of "a" cpu, which is why your load is around 20% user overall.

I don't recognise the process but googling the bit I can see it looks lke it is used as links to files so if you check the whole process name is there a file at the end? Is that process downloading a large file?

Doesn't look good though as although you have 29GB RAM consumed by it, you have less than 0.5GB or swap so I can only assume it has claimed 29GB of virtual RAM but it is empty so not having to be written to disk....?

 

[jamesjaan]

Thank you for the reply. To my knowledge there is no large file downloading.

I'm afraid I can't see the full name of the process as I've just wiped my SSD and I'm reinstalling Mavericks through Internet Recovery.

Even after killing the process and restarting finder my computer has been playing up all last night and this morning since doing a clean reinstall of Yosemite.

Unresponsive, failing to wake from sleep, menu bar not clickable, programs not responding, and already poor battery life down to 3.5 hours.

The computer has been pretty much unusable. I'll wait for the .5 release.

 

[Weaselboy]

I have a runaway process in Yosemite.

It's using around 90% of CPU. My computer is very hot. My battery is drained.

It's also using around 29 GB of RAM / Swap.

I've just done a clean install of Yosemite and it's still there.

Using a 2014 MacBook Air 1.4 / 8GB

I've attached two screenshot of the process.

That x-apple process you have running there is related to Quicklook.

Do a command-i on the process then go to the open files and ports tab and look for what file QL is trying to display that may be causing this.

 

[jamesjaan]

Thanks. I've wiped Yosemite now and gone to Mavericks, so I can't do what you suggest.

However, I was trying to Quick Look some Word 2011 files, which wouldn't show, so I'm guessing it was Word. Though haven't had this problem before.