What is causing softwareupdated to use excessive resources and kill the responsiveness of my Mac? Usually my Mac performs pretty comfortably but for the last hour or so it's been almost unusable. When I type it takes a few seconds to actually display what I've typed or just beachballs for a little while. If I try to open a new tab in Safari it takes about half a minute to actually appear.

When I opened Activity Monitor to see if I could work out what was happening "softwareupdated" was taking 100% CPU and Memory Pressure is in the red. I tried opening the App Store application to see if that would tell me but the application just opens but won't draw any content.



I didn't tell my Mac to update anything, and the App Store app seems useless right now, so how do I find out what is it doing that is causing this?
If you open the Console application I believe it defaults to "All Messages" which might not provide any useful information.

However if you open the Console application, then open the "/var/log" option at the bottom of the left-hand source pane you should find an entry for "install.log". If you select that you should see some information on what softwareupdated is actually doing, or trying to do, to your machine.