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constant 100% CPU usage

H

hmai18

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 26, 2008
270
0
Installed Leopard last night on a 1.33Ghz iBook with 1.5Gb of RAM. Installation went smoothly, including the update to 10.5.2 and all of my settings were migrated from a clone on a FW drive.

However, checking activity monitor, I'm getting an almost constant state of 100% CPU usage, even with the bare minimum of applications running. The system is responsive and everything and I knew Leopard was going to be a bit more resource intensive, but I don't think this is normal. What's going on here?:confused:

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At the top where it says 'My Processes' click and select 'All Processes'. Usually runaway programs are system ones that don't belong to your user. You should see it there when you sort it by CPU.
 
Nevermind: just did a few quick searches and it's mds and mdsworker (spotlight indexing). Which is weird, because I thought I had let it finish indexing the iBook's internal drive last night before I went to bed.

No other external drives are connected at the moment. Hopefully it calms down when it's done.
 
mds/mdworker are (i think) the processes that are responsible for updating the spotlight directory or something. They will eventually finish up, they will finish much faster if you don't use your computer until they are done, just watch that and select Disk Activity from below. Then it all stops the green/red lines will go sink away.
 
i'm pretty sure MDS and MDworker are processes for spotlight... i think i had this problem once, a little while after installing leopard. I let it run for about a day, and then, deciding that it wasn't normal, I did the usual "i have a problem" things (Zapped the PRAM, fsck, repair permissions, sudo periodic daily weekly monthly)... along with a few restarts and it went away.
 
I need to take the iBook to class and work for the day, so I just moved the system hd to the "ignore" list within spotlight for now. Problem solved, at least until I get home again and can just leave it to index itself.
 
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