aex-swscan-bin Uses Almost 100% CPU

Products

• Inventory Solution for Mac
• IT Management Suite
• Inventory Solution

Issue/Introduction

When inventories run on a Mac or Linux computer the process aex-swscan-bin can be seen to use almost 100% of the CPU.

Cause

This is normal behavior on Mac and Linux operating systems (OS's); when no other process is using much CPU the OS will not limit a process that can use the rest of the CPU. This will occur even if the System resource usage setting in the Advanced Options of an inventory policy/task is set to Very Low. The System resource usage setting only affects the priority of the aex-swscan-bin process on Linux and Mac OS's.

Resolution

1. Ensure that the System resource setting is set to low or very low in the inventory policies/tasks (so that other processes will have priority).
2. Schedule the inventory run times when computers will still be on but users will not be using them heavily. Also do not schedule multiple inventory tasks/policies to run at the same time.
3. Do not run Software or File Inventory scans more then necessary since this uses more CPU than hardware scans.
4. Disable scanning of network or remote drives that would lengthen the amount of disk space to scan.