macOS Daemon Silently Consumed 47GB Compressed Memory, Crashing Automation for a Full Day
A macOS system's dasd (Duet Activity Scheduler) daemon accumulated 47GB of compressed memory while showing only 264MB in standard RSS monitoring, pushing swap to 37GB and causing Chrome's launchPersistentContext to time out after 180 seconds. The failure went undetected for 21 hours because the daemon never appeared in top-RSS views, resulting in every social media automation lane returning zero items for an entire day. A monitoring script called mem-hog-guard.sh was already configured to detect and restart dasd, but lacked the necessary sudo permissions to act, so it repeatedly logged failures and sent manual-intervention alerts instead. To fix this, a tightly scoped sudoers rule was introduced granting the script NOPASSWD access to exactly one command — killall dasd — rather than broad root privileges. The setup script validates the sudoers file with visudo before installation to prevent typos from breaking sudo system-wide.
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