lsregister

Update.-- It appears the update to 10.10.4 solved the problem of the occasional runaway lsregister process, as it runs twice when you reboot and never shows up again, so far anyway.

Original.-- Apple's Mac operating systems have used an application "lsregister" to link files with applications. You can Google this to get a full description of what the application is about and what it does. And it's the second thing that is troublesome.

The program (lsregister) is supposed to run when you reboot to check and update any changes to the registry of files to applications. It's only takes a second or so and doesn't consume any CPU memory. And sometimes during long operations it will launch, run and quit, and again just for a second or so and not consume much CPU memory.

But every now and then it's decides to run every 3-5 minutes and in the process uses about 1 Gigabytes of CPU memory. Yes, a memory hog, and not when it just runs but that it never releases the memory, and you find the app memory has increased by that ~1 GB of memory which isn't really being used.

What's frustrating is that you don't know it's doing this unless you check the Activity Monitor for app memory use and find it's jumped unexpectedly for no reason related to your work and you when you actually catching in the list of apps, it doesn't show more than about 10-15 Megabtyes of app memory.

Meaning it's using memory the Activity monitor is recording for the total but not for it individually, or if it is it's too quick to see since the program only runs about a second, but still keeps the app memory active as kept by the Activity Monitor.

Are there solutions to this situation? Not really permanent ones. There are commands to kill, clear or reset lsregister, but these only work temporarily and still never releases the app memory afterward. The only solution is to reset lsregister, meaning it kills and rewrites itself, and then reboot to recover the memory.

One thing Apple has done with OS-X is take away the ability of the user with commands to recover inactive app memory that you could under previous versions of OS-X. Now it reserves inactive (opened and closed) app memory until memory is needed and then compresses it for later use if needed.

You can't look at the app memory usage to see what apps are listed with their respective app memory usage, something Apple should have in their toolbox but not for users. This would help to show where lsregister is using it for its use and then keeping it active. And it would help if Apple would fix lsregister since it's been a consistent problem with Yosemite.

Anyway, just a rant about Apple's terrible job of testing, debugging and fixing their OS-X in recent years. They still seem to be more interested in more bells and whistles and adding more security than necessary, than spending time fixing the mechanics.