I’ve recently been evaluating iSCSI target drivers on my Mac. I tried several and I won’t bore you with those details but one, iSCSI Initiator X from KernSafe, did cause some issues following the evaluation. I wanted to capture the steps I needed to follow when I noticed severe performance issues following my evaluation period.

Several times a day, I would get the spinning beachball when doing normal activities on my Mac. I finally pulled up the Activity Monitor and sorted on %CPU. I then noticed when the performance problem hit, the lsd process (Launch Services Daemon) was consuming all my CPU ticks. I then checked the /var/log/system.log and found:

Mar 18 17:16:01 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar 18 17:16:31 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar 18 17:16:31 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar 18 17:17:01 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar 18 17:17:01 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar 18 17:17:31 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar 18 17:17:31 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar 18 17:18:01 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar 18 17:18:01 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar 18 17:18:14 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 3 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 7 seconds.
Mar 18 17:18:21 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar 18 17:18:52 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar 18 17:18:52 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar 18 17:19:22 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar 18 17:19:22 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Mar 18 17:19:52 --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar 18 17:19:52 mymac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.kernsafe.initiator.x): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

A quick google search shows me this process is from the KernSafe iSCSI software which I recently evaluated. I did follow their uninstall instructions:

Uninstalling iSCSI Initiator X is simple and easy. User just needs to remove /Applications/iSCSI Initiator X.app and /System/Library/Extensions/KSsciPrt.kext. The program will be removed from your computer.

I’m quite certain I followed these instructions so why would this still be on my system? Digging a bit further, I find this service is still registered with launchd so I needed to simply remove it from the system:

# launchctl list
# launchctl remove com.kernsafe.initiator.x
# rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.kernsafe.initiator.x.plist

After removing this nasty leftover my performance problem has been resolved.