Ever had one of those days, where everything just seems to be going wrong? Over the last 6 hours, I’ve been trying to debug why Safari, Mail.app, iTunes and Adium crash without ANY explanation, after any of said applications tried to load a webpage.
It started randomly (haven’t made major changes in the last few days), so I assumed it was something corrupted. The only hint was that after Safari, Mail, iTunes or Adium crashed, PubSubAgent would use 100% CPU time. So, I fire up Instruments and look at the trace for PubSubAgent. It seems to be calling CFHTTPCookieStorageFlushCookieStores many times, which is odd, because a quick Google doesn’t return anything useful about this system call, obviously related to CFHTTP.
Fast forward 4 hours later when I’ve cleared caches, nuked my Safari config, tried removing PubSubAgent (which just made it worse). The fix? Removing ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist. Oddly enough, it has a companion – ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist – corrupt.
So, just a recap; somewhere the system knew my Cookies file was corrupted. But instead of spitting this out to the Console, throwing a Dialog, or ANY form of useful information, I had to trudge through my Library looking for something which could be causing the problem, and manually removing it. It was by chance that I noticed the Cookies folder, which is strangely not in the Safari folder where one would normally expect it.
And just to make matters worse; Safari’s “Reset Safari” did nothing to solve the problem. That’s right, checking the “Remove all cookies” checkbox did NOT remove the cookies!
Good user interaction FTW!
You’re my hero. Not one post came close to having a solution. all the experts at Just Answer.com kept me busy for 5 hours and even had me move or delete every .plist file except this one. Like magic, I’m goo to go. thanks so much.
Gary
awesome. thanks
Sweet $DEITY. Thank YOU.
You are my hero!!! I spent all day working on this before I noticed the pubsubagent connection but I don’t think I would have ever figured out how to fix it if it weren’t for your post. Thanks!!!