Syncserver CPU usage

[showngo]

For the past week I have been having a lot of problems with iCal and Syncserver. .Mac syncing has been hit and miss. Syncserver continually takes up 99% of the CPU and iCal hangs and is very slow. The computer is still (somehow) usable but overall very slow.

I have tried the following:

1. Restarts
2. Dump iCal plist files.
3. Turned off .Mac syncing
4. Trashed all calendars
5. Used syncrospector to reset syncservices.
6. Dumped syncservices folder.

Does anybody have an idea of what is going on, and what I can do?

Macbook Pro 15" CD 2.16ghz 2gb RAM
Mac OS 10.4.10

Thanks!

[showngo]

OK I think I may have just solved this problem for myself.

I trashed all plist files, the ical folder in app support. Then I used the syncrospecter program and reset my syncserver. I then restored the problematic database in ical by using the revert to backup command. After that was restored (slowly) I deleted one calendar at a time, waited 5 minutes and watched to see if the CPU usage dropped. Luckily for me when I got to the last two (the two largest) my personal and work calendars the CPU usage had dropped down to 5%, VICTORY!.

Its been a little bit now and still no problems, I did a back up at this point and we will have to see if it comes back. I have yet to start .Mac syncing agian, I will on Monday if the problem does not rear its ugly head this weekend.

Hope that this helps someone.

[wmu]

What do I do to stop syncserver from slowing my Mac down so much?

[snigit]

Ok, I just read that deleting all your iCals will help with this using ALL your CPU? If I do that what do I do about the calendars of my iPhone?

[mmorgan27]

If you have a process that is consuming CPU like this, and you don't know how to immediately fix the issue, you can eliminate the impact by running:

renice +5 -p {pid of offending process}

This will increase the nice value of the process and any other processes that you are attempting to run will get scheduling priority over the offending process.