google-drive-restarter

google-drive-restarter.md

Google Drive likes to leak memory on macOS, and since the devs don't seem to want to do anything about it I made these two launch agents to periodically restart it so it doesn't tie up a ton of resources.

• place them both in ~/Library/LaunchAgents
• disable launch on login in Google Drive Preferences
• launchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/googledrive.keepalive.plist
• launchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/googledrive.killer.plist
• restart

Use at your own risk, this might mess up your sync somehow. I haven't had any issues personally. Quitting the app from the menu will not restart it, you'll need to launchctl kickstart the keepalive plist or just restart your computer.

googledrive.keepalive.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>KeepAlive</key>
	<dict>
		<key>SuccessfulExit</key>
		<false/>
	</dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>googledrive.keepalive</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/Applications/Google Drive.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Drive</string>
	</array>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<false/>
</dict>
</plist>

googledrive.killer.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>googledrive.killer</string>
    <key>OnDemand</key>
    <true/>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/bin/bash</string>
        <string>-c</string>
        <string>killall Google\ Drive</string>
    </array>
    <key>StartInterval</key>
    <integer>3600</integer>
</dict>
</plist>