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

Question

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:

Solution

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.

Comments

[HikeMike]

And this is why you should use the image upload functionality of this site; these images aren't deleted...

[user3041903]

Thank you! The ps axv command showed me what I needed. Turns out it's part of my CrashPlan backup.

[daviesgeek]

Same here! CrashPlan is the culprit.

[andybak]

and Crashplan here too. Back to Backblaze for me...

[TabsNotSpaces]

Ended up being a Tomcat server for me (though I don't remember what requires it). In order to free up the port (which was dynamically set), I had to stop the Tomcat server $ /usr/local/Cellar/tomcat@8/8.5.63/bin/catalina stop, launch the process I wanted to use my port, then start tomcat again. Note that while tomcat appears to have dynamically reserved that port in my case, you may have specified it in the tomcat server settings (/usr/local/Cellar/tomcat@8/8.5.63/libexec/conf/server.xml). If so, you can change it there and restart tomcat.