LaunchD is spamming my console log!

I noticed some odd behavior, and checked my system log in the console, and I found something like this:

10/23/10 11:42:03 PM	com.apple.launchd[1]	(com.parallels.vm.prl_pcproxy) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
10/23/10 11:42:13 PM	com.apple.launchd[1]	(com.parallels.vm.prl_pcproxy) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
10/23/10 11:42:23 PM	com.apple.launchd[1]	(com.parallels.vm.prl_pcproxy) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
10/23/10 11:42:33 PM	com.apple.launchd[1]	(com.parallels.vm.prl_pcproxy) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

or

0-05-27 17:56:30     com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[676]  (com.akamai.client.plist[1159]) posix_spawn("/Applications/Akamai/loader.pl", ...): No such file or directory
10-05-27 17:56:30     com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[676] (com.akamai.client.plist[1159]) Exited with exit code: 1
10-05-27 17:56:30     com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[676] (com.akamai.client.plist) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

The “Throttling respawn” message is an intentional behavior of launchd; it tries to conserve system resources by preventing a job from running more frequently than every 8 or 10 seconds (if you need something that needs to check in with the system more frequently than that, you can either override the respawn limit or construct your script as a stay-open script, rather than as a triggered or timed script). A

This is generally due to deleting the application on the Macintosh side, and not “fully removing” the application or the application taking longer than 300 seconds to execute. In that case LaunchD will assume that the application has stalled and will kill it and then relaunch it. It is possible to override this timeout, but that’s beyond the scope of this article .

In most cases, by removing an .plist file, you can prevent this behavior. There are potentially five places they can be located:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons
/System/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/LaunchAgents
~/Library/LaunchAgents

The System areas are for Apple only, while the other three are for third party software.

The usual rules apply – Library folder inside a user’s home folder is only for that user, top-level Library folder and /System/Library apply to all user accounts.

As a rule of thumb, LaunchDaemons folders are for items which can be launched during startup and run all the time in the background (or launched on demand), while LaunchAgents are for things which are only
supposed to run while a user is logged in.

I would recommend moving the plists out of the folder (eg to the Desktop), instead of deleting them.

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