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Leopard CPU High Usage

ATSServer is the server for Apple Type Services. Either it's trying to do something like cache a lot of font details (do you have a lot of fonts installed or it's broke).

mdworker is likely something to do with Spotlight. If this is on a new install then I'd consider this normal.
 
Ah, yes. I do have a few fonts and yes, new install with a lot of files (including a nearly full 300Gb external drive).

In fact, I have just spotted this - The Spotlight icon is animated while it's indexing. Very subtle, but handy!

Oh, and Jing works in Leopard too!
 
Wow! After realising that this problem was related to the Spotlight process, I clicked on the icon in the toolbar and got the following readout :



How long to index?!
 
Note also that 50% means 50% of one of your CPUs, so you're not out of juice just yet...

EDIT: Er, now that I look at your screen shot, I see that you already know that.
 
cell-gfx said:
Wow! After realising that this problem was related to the Spotlight process, I clicked on the icon in the toolbar and got the following readout :



How long to index?!
Click to expand...

Well, having left my machine indexing all night, it's still going. It's now not even giving me an estimate of finishing. Anyone else having this problem?
 
I tried stopping and restarting the Spotlight service on my drives, but got an error trying to stop it on my main drive :


iMac:Volumes cellgfx$ mdutil -a -i off
/:
Error: unable to perform operation. (-1)
Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/Optimus:
Indexing disabled.
/Volumes/Untitled:
Error: invalid operation.
No index.
 
That seems to have fixed it. Disabling the external drive allowed the internal one to finish indexing. I've restarted the index on my external drive and it's indexing now (with audible drive activity too!)
 
Nope - it's still badgered. Restarting on the external drive said 15 minutes to complete. I left it for hours and was left with a striped bar scrolling and no completion time.
 
I have the same problem

ATSServer is taking over 60%, mdworker 20%
I'm not worried about mdworker (It'll slow down later on I guess)
ATSServer is driving me crazy...
Some people say it's due corrupt fonts... In my case there were 4 corrupt fonts. I removed them, but the problem persists..

Anyone an idea to solve this? (Otherwise, I'll be forced to go back to Tiger...)
 
daveIT said:
Too much porn? :p :D
Click to expand...

possibly too many pdf files? e-books? the fonts in the e-book pdf files mess up atsserver.

workaround: disable indexing on the directories containing e-books. you can do this by going to system preferences, spotlight, privacy and then press the '+' sign and add the directory location of the pdf e-books.

i had the same problem. i moved al my e-book pdf's to a pdf directory that i excluded from indexing.

in terminal do:

cd e-books
mkdir pdf
mv *.pdf pdf

now if you allow indexing on e-books folder and disallow indexing on pdf folder you can experiment like this:

start activity monitor and order descending on CPU.

in terminal do:

cd pdf
mv a.* ..

this will make all pdf files starting with 'a' visible to the indexer. you can see both mdworker, mds and atsserver spring to life and consume cpu resources. these processes will eventually finnish but it takes a long time.
 
Thank you! You just saved my life! :D atsserver and mdworker went berserk right after I opened a new PDF file. Followed your suggestion and all is back to normal - yay! Thanks again :)
bierbuik said:
workaround: disable indexing on the directories containing e-books. you can do this by going to system preferences, spotlight, privacy and then press the '+' sign and add the directory location of the pdf e-books.
Click to expand...
 
Solution

I had the same problem as you with the ATSServer going nuts and the indexing taking forever.

The solution was wiping out Leopard's font cache. The process died down immediately!

Try following the deletion list on Font Finagler's website (the app is broken in 10.5 at the moment). BUT instead of copy-pasting these files for deletion, type them in and tab-complete the names, as some of them have changed, and some are now entire directories.

- Rick
 
cell-gfx said:
The calendar is part of iStat Menus, an excellent monitoring tool that also gives you quick access to networking tools and activity monitor too! Oh, and it's free. Grade A!
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. Didn't realise it was such a useful piece of software.

Been trying to find this thread for ages to see what the app was, then did a google search to find out why my atsserver was taking up all my cpu...

Two answers, one thread :)
 
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