What is the process "pictd" and why does it kill my computer.

[timotay89]

I (finally) decided to learn all about RAM and all the stuff with activity monitor today as my computer like to go slow sometimes. One thing I've noticed is that if I'm using Pages with other programs (like mathtype or mathematica, etc) if I click to a finder window, finder freezes. Sometimes for only a couple seconds, sometimes over a minute (usually I restart it before then). The problem just happened again, I was editing something in mathtype and then printed it in pages, and then finder froze. However, I noticed in activity monitor that a process called pictd was using a quarter of the 2GB of RAM that I have. This was just the real memory, it had over 1GB of virtual memory too. After I quit the process it freed up a large chunk of RAM and my computer it better again.

Anyone have any idea what pictd is, does, and/or how to stop it?

 

[timotay89]

Apparently I never got an answer to this as I just looked on Google and this was the first hit (I failed to notice that this was my post for about 5 minutes).

I've since upgraded to 6GB RAM but I just had the thing happen again. It was just opening a finder window and I noticed I had a large chunk of memory taken up by something. pictd had 1.46GB of my RAM used up, so that all that was left was some inactive memory and the rest (about 75%) was used. Since having only used and inactive memory slows my computer down, I opened up the activity monitor, saw the process for a second or two, and then it was gone and I had some free memory available again.

Anyone know what's going on?

 

[tyche]

Do you have files with .pic, .pict, .pct extension? Do you use your finder in preview mode? It might be its trying to render a file that it thinks is pict format and isn't or corrupt and causing the process to go nuts.

 

[GGJstudios]

pictd is a helper tool for the Cocoa frameworks. The 64-bit version of QuickLook uses that process to generate previews of PICT files. For more info, see PICT support in 64-bit app.