A MacBook Pro laptop I was using was responding horribly slowly even for simple tasks. When I ran
top to observe the percentage of
CPU usage by process, I found AMPAgent was using a high
percentage of the CPU cycles, going up to 75% at times.
$ top Processes: 146 total, 4 running, 15 stuck, 127 sleeping, 840 threads 16:28:35 Load Avg: 2.66, 2.70, 2.77 CPU usage: 79.61% user, 20.38% sys, 0.0% idle SharedLibs: 484K resident, 0B data, 0B linkedit. MemRegions: 149522 total, 1684M resident, 36M private, 591M shared. PhysMem: 889M wired, 1605M active, 1506M inactive, 4000M used, 95M free. VM: 316G vsize, 1026M framework vsize, 29238312(0) pageins, 7714467(0) pageouts Networks: packets: 18571867/10G in, 26865711/5268M out. Disks: 17358834/424G read, 8677032/391G written. PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #WQ #POR #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE 95944 imklaunchage 0.0 00:04.62 2 1 68 50 184K 1556K 1204K 94149 plugin-conta 0.0 00:04.63 4 1 114 185 576K 30M 9320K 72763 cookied 0.0 00:01.68 2 1 50 42 356K 228K 892K 66565 geod 0.0 00:00.07 2 1 34 47 116K 216K 2512K 65412 vim 0.0 00:00.01 1 0 21 28 0B 216K 132K 65345 bash 0.0 00:00.12 1 0 21 27 4096B 732K 132K 65343 login 0.0 00:00.75 2 1 33 62 0B 256K 2268K 59625- AMPAgent 62.1 135 hrs 5/1 0 25 67 32K 216K 300K 47946 CIJScannerRe 0.0 03:43.18 5 1 108- 80 484K 4684K 3876K 47943 Image Captur 0.0 00:15.50 3 1 110 97 1640K 5000K 5620K 45203 diskimages-h 0.0 00:09.08 3 1 94 69 2964K 3512K 4488K 45160 hdiejectd 0.0 00:05.25 2 1 32 42 252K 248K 1296K 29384- Alerts Daemo 0.0 00:42.48 4 2 99 483 1128K 5528K 2164K 29265- Microsoft En 1.3 10:05:43 14 3 444 2061 92M 97M 163M 28815 ssh-agent 0.0 00:53.46 3 1 52 50 396K 360K 1488K 28702 bash 0.0 00:02.50 1 0 21 27 1176K 732K 1744K 28701 login 0.0 00:00.83 2 1 33 62 0B 256K 2228K 27960- Microsoft Au 1.5 01:50:06 7 2 157 232 1708K 14M 5524K 27514 iTunesHelper 0.0 00:07.47 3 1 63 73 336K 2324K 2128K
Searching the disk drive for it I found that it was associated with the Dell KACE software on the system, which is used for software management on the system.
$ find / -name AMPAgent 2>/dev/null /Library/Application Support/Dell/KACE/bin/AMPAgent
I killed the AMPAgent process and found that it restarted, but was no longer using so much of the CPU's cycles.
$ sudo kill -HUP 59625 Password: $ ps -A | grep AMP | grep -v grep 14018 ?? 0:00.34 /Library/Application Support/Dell/KACE/bin/AMPAgent
At
AMPAgent can utilize too much CPU on MAC and Windows on agent (126339)
on the Dell Software Support
site, I found Dell noting that the 5.5 version of the agent may experience
issues with high CPU usage. The suggested fix was to upgrade to version 6.0
of the agent, which wasn't an option for me on the laptop, since control of
the KACE servers and the KACE software deployed to client systems was under the
purview of others. But I did verify that the version of the software
was an older version, 5.4.10622; you can get the version number by
using AMPAgent --help.
$ "/Library/Application Support/Dell/KACE/bin/AMPAgent" --help
Usage: /Library/Application Support/Dell/KACE/bin/AMPAgent -h <hostname> [-p <port>] [-d]
-h|-host : hostname of server
-p|-port : port of server
-d|-debug : include debug output in logs
-w|-write : write a default amp.conf file
Example:
/Library/Application Support/Dell/KACE/bin/AMPAgent -h kbox
? 2009-2012 Dell Inc.
KACE Agent AMP client version 5.4.10622
