SafariDAVclient taking 100% of CPU on Mac OS X 10.7.2

I have a customer that recently bought a new Mac Mini to replace an older Mac Mini. All of his data was tranferred at the local Apple dealer. A short time later he noticed the new Mac Mini was running really slow. It did not matter what applications he had running. As I started to dig into this issue, I launched the Activity Monitor utility and noticed SafariDAVclient using high amounts of CPU. It was up to 100% of the CPU at times. I googled this issue and many people said this was happened when iCloud was set to sync bookmarks. This was not the case for my customer. He did not have an iCloud account. He did have a MobileMe account. His MobileMe account was not set to sync bookmarks. I tried changing MobileMe setting, but no matter how I set it SafariDAVclient ran on startup and took high ammounts of CPU.

This is how I fixed the issue:

  1. I opened a new Finder Window and navigated to: Macintosh HD\System\Library\LaunchAgents
  2. I made a copy of the file: com.apple.safaridavclient.plist into a folder on the Macintosh HD which I  created and named: Removed from LaunchAgents. This was a backup so it can be restored when and if Apple fixes this bug.
  3. I deleted the original file: com.apple.safaridavclient.plist from: Macintosh HD\System\Library\LaunchAgents
  4. I rebooted the new Mac Mini and SafariDAVclient did not restart and everything ran at full speed again.

Making SafariDAVclient not run on startup was not an issue for my customer as he does not use bookmark syncing to a cloud service. If he decides to in the future and Apple fixes apparent bug, all he needs to do is copy the backup of com.apple.safaridavclient.plist to its original location.

I hope this helps anyone having the same issue.

Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not represent any current or past employer.

5 Responses to SafariDAVclient taking 100% of CPU on Mac OS X 10.7.2

  1. keith
    says:

    Thanks Dave, I’ve been looking for this info for weeks. All working well since I followed your advice and my icloud is syncing fine without it, too.

    • theprincipia says:

      I thought upgrading to Mavericks would fix the SafariDAVclient problem, but it did not. In fact it was worse. My memory immediately dropped to 15MB. I tried many other suggestions of ways to delete SafariDAV client, but it would always return to use up my memory.

      Dave, THANK YOU SO MUCH for your suggestion. It absolutely solved my problem. I still do not really know what SafariDAVclient does, but apparently i don’t use it because I am not missing it at all.

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