today i noticed after a reboot (i do that very rarely), that my iStats Menu CPU monitor shows me heavy CPU load. I fired up Activity Monitor and found that syslogd is using 90% – 100% cpu power – bad syslogd! 🙁

I did some research on the net and found quiete some hints relating Time Machine to that behavior. It was suggested to stop Time Machine in the system preferences and quit syslogd within Activity Monitor. I did that and this seemed to work, but after starting e.g. Console syslogd was at 100% again. Therefore Time Machine was not causing this (at least for me).

Further investigation led me to a file named /var/log/asl.db which is the database file for Apple’s new “Apple System Log facility” and i found that mine had about 23 MB! A big asl.db file could cause syslogd to max out, according to some websites i browsed to (can’t remember which ones).

And this is my fix for now (in Terminal):

cd /var/log
sudo rm asl.db

I don’t like this very much, but it worked, because right after deleting this file, it was recreated, but with far smaller size. I guess i lost some logging infos, but for now i think i’m fine with it.