I have seen installd peg my CPU to 100% and have killed it. What would you suggest I do?
One of the most annoying features of modern OSes is when some system process just decides to start going wild, eating memory and CPU. Often I find reinstalling is the only way to fix such things.
Let it finish. It has some thinking to do, maybe crypto checksums? Maybe just a really inefficient corner case on an algorithm. There's nothing wrong with letting your CPU work. if running at 100% makes your machine flakey, it is broken.
If your foreground performance is being impacted too severely (and I haven't seen this from installd, I just noticed and researched installd while removing Mac Keeper (malware) from my wife's laptop) then reboot. It's extreme, but it has the best chance of getting your processes shut down cleanly as opposed to a kill where you could nail a process in the middle of a state that really does not want to persist. Programmers are a lazy sort. They won't consider the effect of termination at each point in their program. You are hunting for bugs using your live system as bait if you kill a program.
More than weekly (but fairly randomly) I used to find installd would peg my CPU to 100% and just stay there for hours. It doesn't make my machine flakey, but it makes it slow and I have other things to do.
In the end I just reinstalled my OS, restored files from Time Machine, and everything was fine. I never did figure out why it was misbehaving. I have had (once) a similar problem with spotlight. Fortunately there I knew enough to run lsof to find it had got snuck in an infinite loop on one particular mp3 file, which I just deleted.
However, my point (which I should probably have been clearer about) is that bits of OSes are known to just start going wild for no reason, and often killing them, and eventually reinstalling, is the only option.
"then reboot. It's extreme, but it has the best chance of getting your processes shut down cleanly as opposed to a kill"
so... how do reboots work on OS X ? on every *nix flavor I know, there's one command that just halts the damn machine and damn the torpedoes, and there's one command that does it more gracefully, by sending progressively harder-to-ignore signals to ~every process except init, ending up on SIGKILL (which is not trappable).
A standard reboot from the GUI should be fine. If you boot up in verbose mode there are some amusing messages that are displayed at the top of the screen during reboot/shut down when a program has to be force quit by the OS.
One of the most annoying features of modern OSes is when some system process just decides to start going wild, eating memory and CPU. Often I find reinstalling is the only way to fix such things.