Menubar extras may cause SystemUIServer problems

Dec 03, '02 09:19:35AM

Contributed by: Obi

I am not sure if this qualifies as a hint, but I want to share some experiences I had with the SystemUIserver. My system is a DA G4 with 768Nb of ram, 10.2.2 installed. It is always on.

I've noticed since running 10.2, the mac slows down for no reason after a while. Sometimes it occured after a few days, sometimes after two or three weeks. Running 'top' revealed that the SystemUIserver was taking up to 80% of the CPU. It varied from 40% to 70%, but it always showed on top as the big CPU hog. Killing the the SystemUIserver worked, but it starts again with high CPU load. Only logging out and in would cure it.

I started investigating what is was, and I narrowed it down to the menu-bar items that depend on an internet connection. For example, Massinova and Weatherman. If they don't receive data, or the data is not in the correct format (for what ever reason, the servers they rely on were down) they cause the SystemUIserver to max out on CPU load, and slow the system down. If you've got threadviewer installed (comes with Dev Tools), you can actually see which threads in the SystemUIserver cause mayhem.

The solution is to command click and drag the suspicious or offending menubar item from the menubar to delete it. Then you must kill the SystemUIserver process. Only removing of the menubar item is not sufficient; the SystemUIserver must be restarted after the menu bar item has been removed.

Together with the occasional lookupd restart (strange mail server errors, strange websites not reachable errors), this work-around now makes sure that my Mac keeps running with no slowdowns, not losing speed, and no strange network connection problems that sometimes occured with the lookupd bug. Apple, what about a fix?

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