Hi, after installing OS X 10.11, I noticed a process called "sdmd" owned by root, which would consistently use 98% of CPU. I tried killing it, but it would be respawned by the OS after a bit. I also tried to "freeze" it (kill -STOP), which worked and didn't seem to have any adverse consequence. I never heard of this process, it doesn't seem to have a man page, and Google was of very little help. Does anyone have an idea what this could be and what would cause it to burn CPU like that?
What is sdmd?
I believe this has to do with Server 5. I noticed the same thing. It was making zip files of my sparcebundles under the timemachine backups. Except it was copying to my local drive! Used up all the free space I had. Uninstalled Server 5 and it went away.
However then I encountered other issues (all files on external drive went hidden) and I had to revert back to 10.10.4.
reverting back to an old version of OSX or removing server is not really an option is it?
Has this been confirmed as a known bug by Apple?
The problem is in file sharing. Re-adding shared folders fix the issue.
I also occurred at Serve5beta5.
bash-3.2 # launchctl list | grep sdmd
2482 0 com.apple.serverdocs.sdmd
bash-3.2 #
We will temporarily stop thinking and related server document.
sudo launchctl remove com.apple.serverdocs.sdmd
(This process in OS restart started)
To the currently available test to have server function seems no problem.
Or more, we will describe for reference.
I had the same problem. openned up drive info, toggled ignore ownership to on the off again. now all drives quiet as expected.
I tried deleting and re-adding the shares (as suggested by @Tresk), but without stopping the file sharing service. It had no effect. Even after several system restarts, sdmd was still slowing everything down, consuming a whole CPU (out of 8 cores) and causing the fans to crank up on my 2011 mini 5,3 server.
Then, I stopped the file sharing service from the server.app interface in preparation for uninstalling and reinstalling server. The runaway sdmd stopped immediately. When I restarted file sharing service, sdmd did not restart, even after rebooting. YAY!
So, I'm not sure if deleting and re-adding of shares caused this, or just restarting the file sharing service, but I guess that it didn't hurt :-}
HTH someone