The Problem

Adobe seems to have managed to seriously mess up my Apple computer (MacBook running Mac OS X Snow Leopard). Last month, I installed a trial version of InDesign, because I had to do a quick test to see if software developed by my company is compatible with InDesign. It turned out to be perfectly compatible, after which I uninstalled InDesign. Since that time, my MacBook slowed down terribly. Everything related to network activity, the use of sockets and even Airport slowed down to an unacceptable low “speed”.

At first I couldn’t find any cause for the problems, but when I looked in the console, I quickly found the culprit:

Wrong Solution

Every 10 seconds, a plist file caused OSX to attempt to launch a deamon, which didn’t exist. Searching for the source of this problem, I found this site, which suggests that Adobe is the source of all problems. I followed the instructions on that site (including wasting 3 hours with a faulty downloader application from Adobe and three times obligatorily updating Adobe Air while I had the latest version already) to no avail.

Right Solution

So, I decided to search for the files related to the problem and typed

$locate akamai

in the terminal. The locate command found two files:

com.akamai.mac.plist
com.akamai.client.plist

One of them was in a deamons folder, the other in a preferences folder. I simply moved both files to the trash and restarted my Mac. This removed the recurring error message from the console window and improved my Mac’s network performance. Hurray!