… [periodically]'installd' begins using 100% of all 4 CPU cores, my fan goes full speed and the whole computer gets very hot. Seems to happen before Software Update checks for updates. I usually go to the terminal and kill the 'installd' process, which reduces the fan speed and heat to normal within a minute.
I wonder if this guy is also one that says you need to reinstall from scratch every few months to keep things working?
Ubuntu had or has the same issue with a deamon used for the graphical package-administrations-guis rebuilding an index (I forgot the name). They tried to help themselves with appropriate nice-settings, defused the issue, but on old machines you still need to move the cronjob to monthly to have a usable system.
You simply can't use the system properly when a background-process uses all ressources. And one normally want do something else than wait for the system. I consider such behaviour a bug.
Agreed, but to add to your point, if your background process is taking up all the resources in my system, that defeats the purpose of being a background process.
One of the most annoying features of modern OSes is when some system process just decides to start going wild, eating memory and CPU. Often I find reinstalling is the only way to fix such things.
If your foreground performance is being impacted too severely (and I haven't seen this from installd, I just noticed and researched installd while removing Mac Keeper (malware) from my wife's laptop) then reboot. It's extreme, but it has the best chance of getting your processes shut down cleanly as opposed to a kill where you could nail a process in the middle of a state that really does not want to persist. Programmers are a lazy sort. They won't consider the effect of termination at each point in their program. You are hunting for bugs using your live system as bait if you kill a program.
In the end I just reinstalled my OS, restored files from Time Machine, and everything was fine. I never did figure out why it was misbehaving. I have had (once) a similar problem with spotlight. Fortunately there I knew enough to run lsof to find it had got snuck in an infinite loop on one particular mp3 file, which I just deleted.
However, my point (which I should probably have been clearer about) is that bits of OSes are known to just start going wild for no reason, and often killing them, and eventually reinstalling, is the only option.
so... how do reboots work on OS X ? on every *nix flavor I know, there's one command that just halts the damn machine and damn the torpedoes, and there's one command that does it more gracefully, by sending progressively harder-to-ignore signals to ~every process except init, ending up on SIGKILL (which is not trappable).
