5+ gigs of errors in asl.log from mdimportserver

Question

So, after screwing up my MB Pro beyond repair trying to fix wireless in the 10.4.10 update, I wound up doing a fresh re-install of OSX for the first time ever. Even a virgin install with the latest updates hasn't completely solved that problem, but that's another story in another thread...
So on this virgin system, I notice a lot of disk grinding on startup and a high CPU load. Eventually I track this down to spotlight indexing all the files on my hard disk. It seems that spotlight calls webkit to peekinside files, but webkit is generating several metric <edited by host> tonnes of error messages -- to the tune of some 5.4 gigabytes in /var/log/asl.log!!!
Here's some details:
lolita:/var/log peter$ ls -l asl.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 5747500349 Aug 4 12:17 asl.log
lolita:/var/log peter$ du -sh asl.log
5.4G asl.log
lolita:/var/log peter$ wc asl.log
22341643 647896185 5747500349 asl.log
And some of the much-repeated contents:
[Time 2007.08.02 10:07:04 UTC] [Facility user] [Sender mdimportserver] [PID 1406] [Message WebKit Threading Violation - -[DOMNode dealloc\] called from secondary thread] [Level 3] [UID -2] [GID -2] [Host lolita]
The details at the end change, but they are contain:
[Facility user] [Sender mdimportserver] [PID 1406] [Message WebKit Threading Violation
BTW, all of these messages are repeated in system log, but at least they are compresed there:
lolita:/var/log peter$ du -sh sys*
4.0K system.log
8.0K system.log.0.gz
20M system.log.1.gz
12K system.log.2.gz
Fortunately, this seems like a one-time deal, but there are two issues:
- Does Apple know about this? How does one submit a bug report for stuff like this?
- What is the proper method for rotating/clearing out asl.log? I'd really like to re-claim the 5+ gigs of hard disk space it's eating up.
Many thanks in advance...
-p.

Answer 1

I just had the same issue on my early 2006 MBP, although it is not on a virgin system. After sending an email message from Mail.app, I noticed the CPU usage go up to the max on both processor cores. It was being used up by a process called "syslogd" so I used console to watch system.log being filled up with mdimportserver/WebKit messages. I quit all open applications, starting with Mail and Safari, and the CPU usage eventually went down.
I found this thread and rotated my logs to compress system.log, but asl.log remains uncompressed at 73 MB. It was created today at 3:47 a.m., which was when my last daily cron script ran according to daily.out, and was last modified at 12:38 p.m., which was when I noticed the CPU usage drop. I don't know what to do about this. I hope it doesn't happen again. I'm just glad it stopped before it took up 5 GB on my machine.
Here are some samples from system.log. It was the same three messages over and over, in no particular order, several hundred times per second. The messages are identical in console.log.
mdimportserver\[2733\]: WebKit Threading Violation - -\[DOMCSSValue dealloc\] called from secondary thread
mdimportserver\[2733\]: WebKit Threading Violation - -\[DOMCSSStyleDeclaration dealloc\] called from secondary thread
mdimportserver\[2733\]: WebKit Threading Violation - -\[DOMNode dealloc\] called from secondary thread
Here are the corresponding messages from asl.log. I've replaced my computer name with Frankenstein.
\[Facility user\] \[Sender mdimportserver\] \[PID 2733\] \[Message WebKit Threading Violation - -\[DOMCSSValue dealloc\] called from secondary thread\] \[Level 3\] \[UID -2\] \[GID -2\] \[Host Frankenstein\]
\[Facility user\] \[Sender mdimportserver\] \[PID 2733\] \[Message WebKit Threading Violation - -\[DOMCSSStyleDeclaration dealloc\] called from secondary thread\] \[Level 3\] \[UID -2\] \[GID -2\] \[Host Frankenstein\]
\[Facility user\] \[Sender mdimportserver\] \[PID 2733\] \[Message WebKit Threading Violation - -\[DOMNode dealloc\] called from secondary thread\] \[Level 3\] \[UID -2\] \[GID -2\] \[Host Frankenstein\]
Message was edited by Sensei_V to escape bracket characters.