Should I worry about a "scoped bookmarks agent connection interrupted" log message?

Dov picture Dov · Apr 11, 2012 · Viewed 14.5k times · Source

I'm sandboxing my Mac app, and am using the Security-Scoped Bookmarks feature of OS X 10.7.3 to persist references to files outside of the app's sandbox. All my code appears to function correctly, but I end up with the following message repeated hundreds of times in the app's output (for a relatively brief operation).

scoped bookmarks agent connection interrupted

Is this a problem? It makes me think I'm doing something the wrong way, but I'm not sure what that might be.

Answer

abarnert picture abarnert · Apr 26, 2012

No, you shouldn't worry. At least according to Apple employees.

If you have an Mac Dev Center membership, see this thread on the forums for details.

If you don't, probably nobody is allowed to tell you the details, because the thread is in the NDA section of the forum. (Even though it's a Lion feature, and this question is specifically about 10.7.3, the Application Sandboxing forum is part of the Mountain Lion section…)

EDIT: As Dov pointed out, Mountain Lion has been public for quite some time, so the thread is no longer in the NDA section of the forum. (The Application Sandboxing forum has been moved into the Deployment forum, which I believe anyone can access.) You should be able to just follow the link for more details.

But the relevant part, from Apple employee Aerie, is:

This is harmless. The agent aggressively idle exits, interrupting idle connections. Since you're holding your process frozen in the debugger, the connection to the agent is idle.

It's unexpected, but yes, still harmless. We'll take a look at what might be causing the output so frequently.

I don't know whether or not there have been any fixes. I personally haven't noticed it as often under 10.8.2 and 10.8.3 beta as I did under 10.7.3 and the 10.8 PRs… but then I'm not developing the same code, and probably not paying as much attention.