QuickLookSatellite MAC OS, High CPU Use

I have consistently been having a problem with my computer overheating due to the process QuickLookSatellite-general using 100+ CPU use. (Please see images attached.)

On googling I found this process is associated with Draftsight, a CAD program. I do not and have never had this program installed.

Restarting does not even fix this problem. I am also worried about damaging my Macbook at such high CPU temperatures.

Any assistance is appreciated.

4 Answers

Troubleshooting steps:

• See if there are any relevant log messages in Console.app or /var/log/system.log.
• Use qlmanage -r to reset Quick Look client's generator cache.
• Run sudo opensnoop -n QuickLookSatellite-general to see if the process hangs after accessing some specific files. Or select QuickLookSatellite-general in Activity Monitor, press command-I, and see the Open Files and Ports tab.
• Temporarily delete Movie.qlgenerator, Audio.qlgenerator, or other qlgenerator bundles in /System/Library/QuickLook, and run qlmanage -r.
• Temporarily remove applications shown by qlmanage -p | grep /Applications/.
• Disable quicklookd with launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.quicklook.*. The plists are loaded again after you log out and back in.

If nothing else works, you could try doing an upgrade install of OS X from the recovery partition.

What I also found helpful was to turn on QuickLook debugging so I could see exactly what files were being processed. You can do that with this in the terminal. More info in the Mac Developer Library.

defaults write -g QLEnableLogging YES

You can also adjust the debugging level using qlmanage -d debuglevel. Run qlmanage -h for more info.

In my particular case it was QuickSilver causing the issue, which I fixed by disabling image previews using this command in the terminal. My thread on that is here.

defaults write com.blacktree.quicksilver "QSLoadImagePreviews" NO

Also see this similar AskDifferent question.

For me, deleting ~/Library/Application Support/Quick Look/cloudthumbnails.db* seems to have done the job.

For me I ran into this issue when I raised the ulimit number to a very high number. When I changed it back to ~17,000 (from ~260,000) and rebooted, my Mac ran pretty normal again. YMMV obviously.