icloudmacossafari
I felt that my computer was slow today so I checked Activity Monitor. What I found was a process called SafariDAVClient hogging up 3.32GB of memory.
I am not even running Safari. Has anyone seen this problem? I've recently updated to 10.7.2 and my first suspicion is iCloud syncing. If anyone else is having the same problem, we should probably file a bug to Apple.
By observing log messages in ~/Library/Logs/Ubiquity/<my username>/, I realized that Ubiquity (iCloud process) kept trying to create a file in a folder that doesn't exist:
I opened up the Terminal and created this directory and its parent directories up to .ubd:
cd ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/
sudo mkdir .ubd && cd .ubd
sudo mkdir peer-E2B13E4F-56F7-C79B-1621-E30738B638FE-v23 && cd peer-E2B13E4F-56F7-C79B-1621-E30738B638FE-v23
sudo mkdir ftr
Then I changed the newly created directories' owner from root to myself:
cd ../..
sudo chown -R <my username> .ubd/
The fan turned silent instantly.
First of all: High Memory-Usage is not a bad thing in itself - the goal is to have a performant system and it can accomplish that by using RAM.
That you Mac slows down is more likely a problem that a process or an App is hogging Memory and not correctly releasing it, forcing the system to use Swap-Memory (on your Harddrive) and thereby slowing your system down, but that is just one possible scenario.
I think it is necessary to differentiate that because i think you are looking at the wrong place for your problem.
Other Possibilities could be wrong File Permissions, I/O errors of your Harddrive or SSD, timout issues for some process or App (Google Drive, Dropbox etc), corrupted chaches or swap files.
You should:
Try that and post your findings.
Best Answer
I ran into the same problem after updating to 10.7.2. SafariDAVClient also caused CPU-spikes all the time.
Disabling Bookmark Sync in the iCloud preferences, coupled with a reboot "solved" it.
It wouldn't hurt if you would file a bugreport with Apple as well. My ID is rdar://10280447, it's still open.