Support: The Fix for securityd Eatings Gobs of Ram When Updating Keychain Entries

I had been fighting a difficult problem with my mac Mini recently and I had trackedit as far as an issue with the Keychain system. This week Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User podcast reported some major problems with his new Mac Pro. It was only tonight, though, that we realized that we were having very similar problems.

Victor came across this fix tonight and, so far, it appears to be working. I won't know for a couple of days, yet, if this solves the problem, but it seems like we are on the right track.

This is a very low-level, scary, nasty, don't do this unless you know what you are doing fix, but I wanted to place it here in case anyone else is experiencing similar problems.

The Fix for securityd Eatings Gobs of Ram When Updating Keychain Entries

A few nights ago I was updating some not-to-be-named software on my laptop. This piece of software had a few passwords stored in the Keychain. Since said application was recently updated and therefore the code was modified, the system asked me if I wanted to give access to the keychain to this updated application. The dialog that it shown to the user is shown below:

Bad things happened when I clicked the "Change All" button to once again allow this updated application to access all the passwords it was allowed to access. Specifically, the securityd process was using 1.3-1.7GBs of ram (the rprvt value is all that matters). This was really, really bad as it caused my machine to page-out and page-in like crazy. Due to the high memory usage, it also caused my boot volume to run out of space because of all of the swap files in /var/vm/. My point is that very, very, very bad things happened. After I cleared a lot of unused crap (Garage Band loops and old iDVD themes) off my boot volume, I rebooted. I then tried launching the updated application again. I got the same dialog and the same problem. However, since I now had enough hard drive space available, I just waited for about 10 minutes. The passwords were accessed successfully. I then relaunched the application and securityd crashed. Lovely. Rebooting just repeated the cycle. Also lovely.

(Continues)

(Via Unsanity.org.)