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Recover from a runaway netstat process
Authored by: Makosuke on Aug 23, '04 06:07:46PM

I agree that the easiest way to kill the thing is Activity monitor; since I always have the floating bars in the corner of the screen (which is how I ususally notice that netstat has gone berserk again), it's only a couple of clicks to bring up the process list and kill netstat (requires an admin password, but nothing more).

As for why, the thread here had more info than the time I brought it up on MacFixIt and the Apple forums, but no more than I've figured out myself.

What is known is that there's a background process that's trying to call netstat and do something with its output, but netstat goes berserk and stalls, using 100% of a processor untill somebody manually kills it. (Interestingly, if you run netstat via the Network Utility GUI, you can see the same infinite loop of errors for yourself. This doesn't happen right after startup, only after the computer's been on for a while.)

Some Linux mailing lists mentioned that having networking components out of synch with the kernel can cause a similar problem, but that's all I've come up with for theories as to why.

There may be multiple variations of this problem, but at least in my personal explorations I've found no consistent factors other than people with dual processor G5s with 2GB or more of RAM, who used the "upgrade" option when installing 10.3 over 10.2.x.



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