Huge system.log file filled with over a million messages about NSATSTypeset

Question

Hi,
I just happened to notice the system.log file on my MacBook Pro laptop was absolutely huge - over 1.2 GBytes in just one day. Almost all of it is messages like this:
Mar 31 12:26:23 macbook quicklookd[228]: <NSATSTypesetter: 0x146b40>: Exception * table 0x1473caa0 has block 0x147b3040 rather than 0x147b4850 at index 7573 raised during typesetting layout manager <NSLayoutManager: 0x124140>\n 1 containers, text backing has 16461 characters\n selected character range {16461, 0} affinity: downstream granularity: character\n marked character range {16461, 0}\n Currentl
y holding 16461 glyphs.\n Glyph tree contents: 16461 characters, 16461 glyphs, 4 nodes, 128 node bytes, 16384 storage bytes, 16512 total bytes, 1.00 bytes per character, 1.00 bytes per glyph\n Layout tree contents: 16461 characters, 16461 glyphs, 7573 laid glyphs, 207 laid line fragments, 3 nodes, 96 node bytes, 13656 storage bytes, 13752 total bytes, 0.84 bytes per character, 0.84 bytes per glyph, 36.58 laid glyphs per laid line fragment, 66.43 bytes per laid line fragment\n, glyph range {7573 0}. Ignoring...
and there are over 1.3 million of these messages!!!! There is a tiny bit of variation in some of the numbers (but not all). That is just a little bit more than the total number of files I have on the hard drive in the laptop, so it would appear that the quicklookd is doing something to each and every file on the computer. Any idea why all of a sudden these messages appear and why so many. I only have about 7 versions of the system.log files and none of them are even close to this big, but the one one thing I did do today that I have not in a few weeks is reboot my laptop because of another problem with the laptop screen not waking this morning from being put to sleep last night (was just black but computer was running and could login to it from another computer in the LAN it is attached).
Any ideas why this is happening, or is this something that always happens on a reboot/boot rather than waking from sleep. Why would the quicklookd be printing out so many of these messages that are almost exactly alike???
I have only had this MacBook for a few weeks, so don't have a good feel for what is normal and what isn't yet.
THanks...
-Bob

Answer 1

Bob,
Thanks for your further thoughts and the additional information. My guess is that Quick Look does its file processing independently of whether or not or how recently the computer has been rebooted. The NSATSTypesetter messages filling up the log file are almost certainly error messages and should not occur with normal operation of Quick Look. I suspect that your reboot doesn't directly have anything to do with this problem. (It might have indirectly contributed in the sense that either whatever caused the need for the reboot or the reboot process itself corrupted a file, which in turn caused Quick Look to fail and generate all those error messages in the log file.)
In the meantime I may have a solution for this problem. This morning I rebooted in single user mode and ran AppleJack in manual mode so that I could tell it to clean up all user cache files. (I'd previously downloaded AppleJack application from http://applejack.sourceforge.net/ . To boot in single user mode hold command and s keys at startup chime. ... Run the five AppleJack maintenance tasks in order. The third task will give you the option to enter numbers of users whose cache files will be cleaned. Do this cache cleaning for all users.) In the six hours since I ran AppleJack I've seen exactly two NSATSTypesetter error messages in /var/log/system.log . This compares with hundreds of thousands in the same period yesterday. I just set an iCal alarm to remind me to report back to this discussion thread in two weeks on this issue.
Best,
Chris.
PS: Above you mention 7 log files. Are the older ones of the form system.log.0.bz2 ? If so they have been compressed. Just because they are small doesn't necessarily mean there are not a lot of nearly identical error messages. Uncompress to check. I haven't tried this because large files are very inconvenient to work with on my old iBook.