[DominikHoffmann]

I believe iCal Helper is a process inside of the iCal app bundle that is in charge of monitoring the time and putting up iCal's alarms.

I lately have had real issues with it in that it would fail to respond and cause others of my applications be ultra-slow in responding to user feedback. Once I examined the situation in Activity Monitor, iCal Helper was shown as unresponsive and the active RAM usage was maxed out. Force-quitting iCal Helper in Activity Monitor freed up most of the active RAM and made everything else act normally.

Searching the web I found suggestions of trashing all the com.apple.ical files in ~/Library/Preferences/, as well as, the folder ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.ical/. These had no effect. Once I restarted iCal, I could watch iCal Helper's RAM allocation slowly tick up, until all the green in Activity Monitor's RAM pie had disappeared.

I am using Leopard 10.5.2 on a MacBook Pro. My calendar is pretty large, as it contains items reaching back to 1998. Before anyone says, "Ah, there you have it!" I would like to preempt by pointing out that computers are supposed to help us by managing information for us on a scale that we wouldn't be able to with traditional means. In other words, if a calendaring application can handle only a year's of appointments and entries, what good is it?

Dominik Hoffmann

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by DominikHoffmann 

I believe iCal Helper is a process inside of the iCal app bundle that is in charge of monitoring the time and putting up iCal's alarms.

I lately have had real issues with it in that it would fail to respond and cause others of my applications be ultra-slow in responding to user feedback. Once I examined the situation in Activity Monitor, iCal Helper was shown as unresponsive and the active RAM usage was maxed out. Force-quitting iCal Helper in Activity Monitor freed up most of the active RAM and made everything else act normally.

Searching the web I found suggestions of trashing all the com.apple.ical files in ~/Library/Preferences/, as well as, the folder ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.ical/. These had no effect. Once I restarted iCal, I could watch iCal Helper's RAM allocation slowly tick up, until all the green in Activity Monitor's RAM pie had disappeared.

I am using Leopard 10.5.2 on a MacBook Pro. My calendar is pretty large, as it contains items reaching back to 1998. Before anyone says, "Ah, there you have it!" I would like to preempt by pointing out that computers are supposed to help us by managing information for us on a scale that we wouldn't be able to with traditional means. In other words, if a calendaring application can handle only a year's of appointments and entries, what good is it?

Dominik Hoffmann

This doesn't mean computers are magical and don't have limits like humans do. Computers DO have limits.

There are tricks that allow huge databases to perform better. One trick is to archive a huge chunk of old rarely used data so that it doesn't bog the database's performance.

Since iCal is somewhat like a database and you say that it's huge and goes all the way back to 1998, I suggest you archive some things from 1998 to 2003...you have to ask yourself if it's really necessary to have such old data.

Is it? What do you do that requires you to have access to data all the way back to 1998?

However, if this issue is recent, I doubt the size of your calendar is the issue. Performance degradation doesn't appear suddenly. You would have noticed the slowless back in 2007 since I don't think 1 year worth of calendar events over 10 years would suddenly make iCal go crazy.

[DominikHoffmann]

I may have succeeded in fixing the problem. This is what I did:

1. Exported all my calendars to individual files.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Delete all com.apple.ical... files in ~/Library/Preferences/.
4. Delete the folder ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.ical/
5. Delete ~/Library/Application Support/iCal/
6. Delete ~/Library/Calendars/
7. Delete ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/iCal
8. Delete ~/Library/Caches/iCal
9. Launch iCal; it now contains only empty "Home" and "Work" calendars.
10. Delete the "Work" calendar.
11. Import all my previously exported (Step 1) calendars into new calendars.
12. Delete the "Home" Calendar.

iCal is now using only a relatively tame 87 MB of physical RAM. iCal Helper is not currently running and therefore also not gobbling memory.

I'll monitor the situation and will report back, if anything changes.

Dominik

[DominikHoffmann]

Deleted.