And how do I stop the bloody thing? It's made a brand new MBA utterly slow and highly annoying. What can I use to possibly clean out my system and reduce kernel_task's memory?

Seriously, this is a 2 month old computer, totally brand new, not even refurb and it's slowed down tremendously in the last couple of weeks. It's infuriating.

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trisho.
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Official Card-Carrying Mother Earthin' Sl*t.

The kernel task might be an attempt by you computer to keep cool. Seriously. You may have another process that is using the CPU in a demanding way. Reboot, then check Activity Monitor to see what else is using the CPU in a big way.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

It's usually Google Chrome that's sucking up space. I'm in the process of closing a bunch of tabs. Both to possibly get my computer fast again and to clear out visual/mental clutter. I don't think it's just Chrome though.

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trisho.
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Official Card-Carrying Mother Earthin' Sl*t.

Quote
trisho.
And how do I stop the bloody thing? It's made a brand new MBA utterly slow and highly annoying. What can I use to possibly clean out my system and reduce kernel_task's memory?

Seriously, this is a 2 month old computer, totally brand new, not even refurb and it's slowed down tremendously in the last couple of weeks. It's infuriating.

Start by safe booting:

[support.apple.com]
[support.apple.com]

After that, start up normally and see if the issue continues. If so, you'll need to do some troubleshooting. This issue is often caused or precipitated by errant third-party software.

By the way, you're complaining about two separate things that may or may not be related—memory usage and slowdowns. The only one I'd worry about is the latter. Launching Activity Monitor and sorting by-descending CPU% will quickly show you the process(es) that is hogging your system's processor.

Quote
trisho.
It's usually Google Chrome that's sucking up space. I'm in the process of closing a bunch of tabs. Both to possibly get my computer fast again and to clear out visual/mental clutter. I don't think it's just Chrome though.

Well, it would be good to confirm that.

Chrome has an auto-updater and also supports Flash. Both can cause problems and the latter is a notorious (and increasingly irrelevant and unnecessary) CPU hog. Why not use another browser e.g. Safari for awhile to see if the issue recurs?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/2015 06:01PM by Article Accelerator.

How often are you rebooting?

Yosemite is pretty inefficient at memory management and has a few unfinished "enhancements" under the hood. Where I used to recommend rebooting once a week for Mavericks users, I've been recommending daily reboots under Yosemite.

...

Also, if this slowdown only started recently, do an adware scan.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/2015 06:15PM by Onamuji.