Tracking down .log file creators?

Question

I have had disk space getting eaten up and discovered using "WhatSize" a number of files in the private/var folder set (see discussion on similar in Nov 2008) The response to the query then was to track down what was writing the files in the first place.
I can locate the files - a series called swapfile which build exponentially to a size of 1 GB, but there is no indication of what app is creating the file.
I have found a similar set with suffix .asl which ostensibly are created by Adobe Photoshop CS3 - great, except I don't have that installed on my iBook. I do have Photoshop CS, but the recent creation dates (last week) of the files don't match up with my last use of Photoshop (two months ago).
Has anyone any suggestions?

Answer 1

Hmm, Niel may have some ideas, but several things strike me as being odd with what is happening on your machine. First, those swap files should have been cleared out with a simple restart, you should not have had to remove them by hand. In fact, from what I've read you really aren't supposed to.
Second, if you are running 10.5.7 and have Activity Monitor set to show all processes, you really ought to see aslmanager at some point--it is supposed to run "as needed" when called by syslogd. For more information about it, see this note at MacFixIt:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20090122213555897
And if everything is running along normally, I don't think kernel_task should be using too much of your system resources. At the moment, with only two programs running of my own, it is using 1.2% of the CPUs and 71MBs of RAM. If kernel-task is hogging your resources I would think something is wrong, perhaps a bad driver or other system level extension of something.
If you haven't done so, you might try launching Console from your Utilities folder, make sure the Log List is showing (there's an icon in the top left corner to hide and show it), expand the Log Database Queries at the top, and select All Messages. You'll see a lot of messages about what your computer did to get started, then other messages will start to appear, they'll all be time-stamped, see if you start to get a lot messages about something that isn't working (which would account for the too large log files), or else you might see that the kernel is working very hard at something or other, and what it might be (which would tell you why the kernel-task is using a lot of resources).
Francine
Francine
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