distnoted process hogging memory when running dota2/steam on a mac

Question

I am playing Dota2 on a non-gaming oriented machine (low spec macbook). After I have been playing for some time, the process "distnoted" starts taking a lot of memory and I have to restart Dota otherwise it becomes unplayable.

Is there any way to fix this?

Answer 1

The official bug is pending (http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/0/616189742887319167/), so I just wrote a script to use the workaround (killing distnoted)

#!/bin/bash
MEM_LIMIT_PERCENTAGE=0.5
CHECK_INTERVAL=60
while true
do
  PID=`ps -f -U $USER | grep /usr/sbin/distnoted | grep -v grep | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 2`
  MEM_USAGE=`ps -o %mem -p $PID | sed 1d`
  if [ `echo "$MEM_USAGE > $MEM_LIMIT_PERCENTAGE" | bc` = "1" ]; then
    echo "Mem usage high. Killing distnoted"
    kill -9 $PID
  else
    echo "Mem usage within bounds"
  fi
  sleep $CHECK_INTERVAL
done