OS X Yosemite process "onlineupdatemain"

Question

Recently I encountered a situation where my laptop low on available RAM. I found it odd since I 16 gigs of ram.  I launched iCleanMemory and it was not able to clear the ram either, in fact it said that I only had 8 gigs of ram and it was all used up. 
So I launched activity monitor, selected memory tab and saw a process "onlineupdatemain" using up 21gb! I forced quit it and all went back to normal for a while and then it did it again.  I also noticed that a process called softwareupdated was not responding. 
I have done all the usuals, clear SMC, zap pram.. restart etc..
Here are screen shots:

Answer 1

This procedure is a diagnostic test. It makes no changes to your data.
Please triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
mdfind onlineupdatemain | pbcopy
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear below what you entered.
The output of the command will be automatically copied to the Clipboard. If the command produced no output, the Clipboard will be empty. Paste into a reply to this message.
The Terminal window doesn't show the output. Please don't copy anything from there.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.