What is the task "java" (parent process "launchd") doing on MacOS X?

I have a process called "java" showing up in my Activity Monitor that uses a good amount of CPU (4 - 8% average, 20 - 80% on occasion). It reports that "launchd" is its parent process.

Any idea what this is? I used this command to try to see what's going on (can't find where I found it at), but got no useful information (although a LOT is going on): sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys java

If I kill it; it comes back... and it uses a good amount of memory again. Some screenshots of stats can be seen below:

info1 image

drewjoh

Posted 2011-05-12T03:52:49.717

Reputation: 255

1And this is why you should use the image upload functionality of this site; these images aren't deleted... – Daniel Beck – 2011-09-08T02:42:29.567

Answers

Pretty much all processes on OS X are launched by launchd (just open Activity Monitor and display All Processes Hierarchically). This is the root launchd though, which hints at a launchd job in [/System]/Library/LaunchDaemons or [/System]/Library/LaunchAgents.

If you don't want to search the plist files for launchd, you can open Terminal and run ps axv | grep java or ps vp 3173 (or whatever its process ID is right then) to see the command line arguments to java, which should specify which Java application (e.g. jar) is actually used for that process.

Daniel Beck

Posted 2011-05-12T03:52:49.717

Reputation: 98 421

4Thank you! The ps axv command showed me what I needed.

Turns out it's part of my CrashPlan backup. – drewjoh – 2011-05-12T06:46:11.147

Same here! CrashPlan is the culprit. – daviesgeek – 2012-07-27T06:56:54.853

1and Crashplan here too. Back to Backblaze for me... – andybak – 2012-10-27T09:22:22.330

Quite late to the party, but since CrashPlan has not fixed this in nearly 2 years, I found an interesting approach to a workaround:

http://www.chainsawonatireswing.com/2012/04/08/how-to-use-crashplan-but-keep-the-java-process-from-constantly-using-ridiculous-amounts-of-ram/

Seth Webster

Posted 2011-05-12T03:52:49.717

Reputation: 1