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systemUIserver and High CPU in Snow Leopard - Help!

wow, this just happened to me. I wonder...

--will this bug wake up sleeping macs and put the cpu to 100% for a full hour?

--will non sleeping, yet unattended macs that cycle their cpu's at 100% for a full hour kill any macs?


this is totally going to be big news on Monday, you think?

Apple stock.......going down?


P.S. t minus 30 minutes for the west coast...get ready to shut down for a while if running SL!

Apple, you have one year to fix this!
 
This is easily the most asinine and random OS bug I've ever come across.

Clock in menu bar causes CPU usage to spike to 100% in anticipation of DST changeover?
 
bloggers, take your mark....ready, set, Digg!

you heard it here first, huge news on monday, if not sunday!


(something rang inside me when someone said... "Apple's Vista"—this bug is very Vista-esque.)

I smell a serious adjustment of the stock price soon, if not monday, already down $20 in less than 2 weeks. glad I do not gamble in the stock market
 
The time changed in Europe a week ago & I did not even notice this bug.

The stock market is down in general & it seems there have been some (over) reactions to Android 2.0, Droid, etc.
 
macrem said:
The time changed in Europe a week ago & I did not even notice this bug.

The stock market is down in general & it seems there have been some (over) reactions to Android 2.0, Droid, etc.
Click to expand...

Good point. Seems like it would have shown up there last week. Guess we'll find out in about 10 min, here in California.

As for the market, I think there's worry it not really "recovering" - that, and some profit taking. Targets still had Apple at 250-300, last I read.

edit: 2am and all is, um, not well - right on the second, SystemUIServer at ~97%. btw: I have the analog clock in the menubar. Doesn't seem to matter which option.

Turning off the menubar display makes it happy. Turning off "Set date and time automatically" makes no difference.

edit: This might be anecdotal, but I swear I put our MBA to sleep earlier this evening and it woke itself up to switchover. I happened to walk by it and noticed it was awake - and, running SystemUIServer full steam. The anecdotal part being whether or not it woke itself up at 2am. But, I swear I put it to sleep... (I just left it alone, figuring it'll sort itself out within the hour.)
 
Yikes!

Well, I'm glad it's not just me and my Macs. Very odd. I'm shutting them both down for the night.
 
gaspig70 said:
Well, I'm glad it's not just me and my Macs. Very odd. I'm shutting them both down for the night.
Click to expand...

It's not like it's going to melt the system. They're made to run under full load, provided there's adequate cooling (even then, it'll shutdown if it exceeds normal temps). If you're on the PST, it'll all be over in about 5 minutes (at least, that's what the eastern time zones have reported).
 
i wonder if this affected macs that were sleeping at the time?

gr8tfly said:
It's not like it's going to melt the system. They're made to run under full load, provided there's adequate cooling (even then, it'll shutdown if it exceeds normal temps). If you're on the PST, it'll all be over in about 5 minutes (at least, that's what the eastern time zones have reported).
Click to expand...

1 (hour) and done, for sure.
 
Left to its own devices, the MBA returned to normal on the stroke of 0200 PST. I also turned my menubar clock (on my MBP) back on - everything's back to normal.

Whatever it was, it must have thought there was no valid time between 2am PDT and 2am PST. Spooky.:confused:

Although rather annoying, and, I'm sure, embarrassing:eek: to Apple (and us evangelists ;) ), there doesn't appear to have been any data loss or OS lockups, hangs, crashes, etc..
 
Kimba said:
Happened to me right at the first 2:00 a.m. and now it's gone after the second 2:00 a.m. In between those two times I removed the clock as suggested on the Apple support forum thread.
Click to expand...

Yep, that worked fine. I just decided to leave one machine (our MBA) go on along on its own. I removed the clock on my machine (a MBP), then at 0200 PST, turned it back on. The MBA took care of itself just fine.

It'll be really interesting to learn what SystemUIServer thought it was doing during the "witching" hour (ironic it fell on Halloween lol). I can imagine it "thinking" it fell through the Looking Glass, or some realm where time didn't exist as we know it. :p
 
To quote myself from my post.

creator2456 said:
I was just adding some Quicklook plugins when my temps started to soar. I have restarted, repaired permissions, removed said plugins, and tried other accounts. Nothing is lowering the temps.

Weird thing is is Activity Monitor is showing NOTHING using the processor nearly enough to jump my temps to 85 C with nothing running.

I'm "controlling" the issue for now by ramping my fans to full speed. Even with this I am hovering around 70 C...a good 10-15 C above what I am normally at (and was at 30 minutes ago).
*Note: Normally running fans at 6000rpm would give me temps in the mid to low 40 C range

What is going on? Is there anything I can do? What else to try?

HELP!
Click to expand...

creator2456 said:
Could be the issue, but I don't think it could be.

Reasons:

- Didn't happen until 3:30 am CDT
- SystemUIServer is not eating CPU

Could be related, but not the same issue.

Also noticing that even though it is reading a unusually high temp, it doesn't feel that hot.
Click to expand...

I have tried everything suggested in this thread with no success.

Another thing, I have not had Time & Date in my menu bar for months. Was using iStat Menus for the clock, but now have Geek Tool doing the job.
 
gr8tfly said:
Anything going on with the GPU? It can greatly contribute to temp increases. I'm not sure which tool you're using for temps, i.e. whether it can even monitor GPUs. I use Hardware Monitor, myself.
Click to expand...

Using iStat. All other temp sensors are within normal range (GPU at 44). I am noticing that iStat is reporting a 70% and up CPU usage. Looking at activity monitor reveals nothing using over more than 6% and adding up the %s I get ~35%.

Can there be a hidden process that Activity Monitor isn't showing?
 

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creator2456 said:
Using iStat. All other temp sensors are within normal range (GPU at 44). I am noticing that iStat is reporting a 70% and up CPU usage. Looking at activity monitor reveals nothing using over more than 6% and adding up the %s I get ~35%.

Can there be a hidden process that Activity Monitor isn't showing?
Click to expand...

I can't think of any, if you have it set to show "All Processes".

You can also use Terminal, and login as root (carefully)
Code: 
su root
. Then run either/or
Code: 
top
and
Code: 
ps -ax
(You can redirect the output of ps to a text file where it might be easier to peruse.)
Code: 
ps -ax >pslist.txt
Remember you're logged in as root, so be certain of the commands you are using.

Hope this helps you track down the culprit.

edit: comparing it to my system, it looks pretty normal. I only have Safari, Hardware Monitor, Mail, iTunes, Terminal, TextEdit, and WeatherVane running.
Code: 
Processes: 73 total, 2 running, 71 sleeping, 356 threads               03:19:33
Load Avg: 0.13, 0.70, 0.63  CPU usage: 1.40% user, 12.67% sys, 85.91% idle

I noticed you have 90 processes - have you accounted for them all? Also, for those temps, ~6000RPM fan speeds seem high. Mine at both at 2000RPM, with CPUA @ 65C
 
gr8tfly said:
Code: 
Processes: 73 total, 2 running, 71 sleeping, 356 threads               03:19:33
Load Avg: 0.13, 0.70, 0.63  CPU usage: 1.40% user, 12.67% sys, 85.91% idle

I noticed you have 90 processes - have you accounted for them all? Also, for those temps, ~6000RPM fan speeds seem high. Mine at both at 2000RPM, with CPUA @ 65C
Click to expand...

Have the fans running that fast to keep it down below 65 C. If I put them to where I normally have them (2750) I shoot up over 70. I try to stay below that whenever possible.

Hope I can figure this out. Been away from my Time Machine drive for a few days and have done a good bit of work that isn't backed up.

Thanks for the help.
 
creator2456 said:
Have the fans running that fast to keep it down below 65 C. If I put them to where I normally have them (2750) I shoot up over 70. I try to stay below that whenever possible.

Hope I can figure this out. Been away from my Time Machine drive for a few days and have done a good bit of work that isn't backed up.

Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

Mine's a unibody, so there might be some difference in fan speeds. But, 70c isn't "hot". Maximum ratings are 100 or over, depending on the specific model part. My fans don't start spinning up until the temp reaches >87c, but I'm sure the curves are different on the unibody. From the looks, they try to let the giant heatseak of the topcase do its job, keep the machine quiet, then once it's done as much as it can, throw some fan into the equation.

All clocks synced, and computer's happy - off to bed for me. :)
 
Apple's Vista

I also had this problem last night and I'm glad that it is not my mac only...

but seriuosly apple has to do much work to make sure that SL doesn't turn into a Apple's Vista... SL has been out in the market for a few months now and everyday more bugs are found, and that pisses many mac users off.
I just hope that 10.6.2 would solve most of these bugs.
Now I am seriously thinking of moving back to Windows with 7 recieving mostly good reviews.. plus I don't want to be stuck with SL for the next two years until 10.7 comes out which we won't be sure if it would be better.
 
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