MacOS – opendirectoryd taking up 1/4 of the cpu and driving fans crazy on MacBook Air

active-directorydaemonsmacosopendirectoryd

Since a couple of days my 2011 13" MBA (i5, 1,7Ghz) has a very strange issue which I don't know how to get rid of.

Every now and then (sometimes more times a day) a process called opendirectoryd takes up 99-101% of my CPUs. This causes the temperature to go up and after a short while the fans kick in. My MBA is logged in as part of an Active Directory Domain.

First I tried waiting a couple of minutes, but the process didn't stop. Rebooting the machine seems to always fix the problem, but that's not exactly my preferred solution for this problem.

For now I stick to force kill the process. I need to repeat this 1-2 times per iteration and then there's a undefined period of time in which I'm safe.

I'm not sure if it is related to the 10.7.2 update or to something else.

I found others having a similar problem. In that case it seems to be related to a Livescribe pen. While I have a Livescribe pen (updated to the latest version of the client software) I don't have any suspicious entries in Console.app.

Any help would be appreciated.

Best Answer

Here are the results of my investigation: https://superuser.com/a/426719/135263

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As mentioned by @juanpablo, this may be caused by symlinks.

Apparently, if a symlink points to /home, autofs or automountd fire and take a lot of CPU to figure out that the place indeed doesn't exist.

Take a look at /etc/auto_home and /etc/autofs.conf.

To see if you're being hit by this particular problem, set

AUTOMOUNTD_VERBOSE=TRUE

option in autofs.conf, restart automountd

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.automountd

and review the syslog.log (you may use application: Console). You're affected by this problem if you see something like that:

May 20 17:53:43 xxx automountd[31709]: od_search failed

To workaround, edit the file /etc/auto_master and remove (or hash out #) the line starting with /home. Then run:

sudo automount -vc
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