opendirectoryd consumes 40% of CPU

Question

I have a MacBook Pro with Lion 10.7.2, 2.26 GHz CPU and 2GB DDR3 RAM.

If I call

top -o cpu

the /usr/libexec/opendirectoryd process consumes more than 40% of CPU.

$ ps aux | grep opend                                                                       
root 27834 40,4 0,3 2472048 5780 ?? Rs 6:36PM 167:19.66 /usr/libexec/opendirectoryd

Answer 1

The problem is related to the dead symlinks in Dropbox. Find them using:

find ~/Dropbox -type l -printf "%Y %p\n" | grep "^N"

The solution is: Remove the dead symlinks. If find doesn't have the printf option, use:

find -L ~/Dropbox -type l

References

To find dead symlinks

Answer 2

As mentioned by @juanpablo, this may be caused by symlinks.

Apparently, if a symlink points to /home, autofs or automountd fire and take a lot of CPU to figure out that the place indeed doesn't exist.

Take a look at /etc/auto_home and /etc/autofs.conf.

To see if you're being hit by this particular problem, set

AUTOMOUNTD_VERBOSE=TRUE

option in autofs.conf, restart automountd

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.automountd

and review the syslog.log (you may use application: Console). You're affected by this problem if you see something like that:

May 20 17:53:43 xxx automountd[31709]: od_search failed

To workaround, edit the file /etc/auto_master and remove (or hash out #) the line starting with /home. Then run:

sudo automount -vc