coffee, black   no sugar

There are many beautiful things about OS X, but for all its beauty it gave me some headaches during the last weeks. And finally I found a fix! Read on if you Mac is sometimes slowing down to a crawl.

Being a UNIX guy (a word seemingly coming more out of fashion every year), I used top to see what was going on. It was not difficult to see that SyncServer was the culprit. It was using both of my cores repeatedly and sucking in lots of memory (btw: you want to order your Intel Mac with maximum memory - I did not).

I tried to google for syncserver and did not really find anything conclusive and also the apple knowledge base did not enlighten me. So I went with the blackbox approach and fired up iSsync to poke a stick into it and see what would happen.

Turns out that iSsync has a switch in its preferences if synching on this computer is enabled. That was turned on, although I do not have a .Mac account. I switched it off (reset the sync history while i was at it), quit iSync and killed the SyncServer. Voila! The SyncServer got started again by itself, but now it was behaving well and nicely. A day later, its total CPU usage is 68 seconds with a memory footprint of 38M.

Easy to fix yourself. Get a terminal window and start top. If your SyncServer has used hours of CPU time and 100M or more memory, it might do wonders to turn synching off.

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