Crazy high CPU temperature right after startup...help?

[Insulin Junkie]

Greets

In the past couple of days I've experienced a problem with my alu macbook.
My CPU temperature (on all macs I've owned so far) has always been hovering at around 45-50 degrees, with the fan never going much above 2005 rotations / minute, regardless of what I was doing with the computer.

My macbook I'm using at the moment has been the same for the month I've had it now, though of late my macbook's CPU temperature will reach up to 82 degrees within 10 minutes of being switched on (from being completely cold a.k.a. not used in a while) and my fan revs at up to 2800 rpm permanently to compensate. It'll happen despite me not running any applications.

Do I need to get it to an apple store, or can I do something before I resort to bringing it in?

Thanks!

 

[spinnerlys]

You mean degree Celsius, don't you?

Have you looked at Activity Monitor (Show All Processes) and seen what process taxes the CPU?

It might be QuickLook or Spotlight, that eat up some CPU.

A permissions repair could help.

 

[Insulin Junkie]

Thanks.. did that. Something called mdworker ...gets up to 96.0 under CPU (from 25.0 - 95.0), while no other process even goes above 10... might be that! Any idea what it is?

And yes, degrees C!

EDIT: How do I perform a permissions repair?

 

[edgew8]

Unless you know how to take apart the macbook and remove the heatsink and reapply thermal grease and put it all back together without killing your warranty (you cant), you should take it in to an Apple store.

 

[iPhil]

From a quick google search "mdworker" is a Spotlight process... 😱

 

[spinnerlys]

Permissions Repair

 

[Insulin Junkie]

From a quick google search "mdworker" is a Spotlight process... 😱

Ah thanks a lot.. could have thought to do that too. The process must have been active before as well, do you think it could be that which is causing my CPU temperature to be that high all of a sudden? Somehow I find that hard to believe!
Would you recommend trying to stop that process?

@spinnerlys: thanks much, doing it now. If this doesn't resolve it and nobody has any other ideas I'll take it in to the apple store tomorrow.

 

[spinnerlys]

If the CPU is used by mdworker, then this process causes the high temperature "in"directly.

The CPU uses power/electricity, and the more CPU is needed, the more power has to be used to get the CPU up to speed.
The more power is used, the more heat is generated, the more the fans have to whirl.

 

[iPhil]

Ah thanks a lot.. could have thought to do that too. The process must have been active before as well, do you think it could be that which is causing my CPU temperature to be that high all of a sudden? Somehow I find that hard to believe!
Would you recommend trying to stop that process?

Anything under User your name you can kill the process... User = root is a system process. if you "kill" a root process then there's a chance of your system becoming unresponsive etc.. 😱

 

[spinnerlys]

@spinnerlys: thanks much, doing it now. If this doesn't resolve it and nobody has any other ideas I'll take it in to the apple store tomorrow.

MRoogle results for mdworker

No need to go the Apple just yet, the problem is OS specific and not hardware related (meaning the hardware doesn't cause the problem, it solves it partially by spinning the fans), but software related, which can be solved by you, if you somehow know something about computers and researching.

 

[Insulin Junkie]

Anything under User your name you can kill the process... User = root is a system process. if you "kill" a root process then there's a chance of your system becoming unresponsive etc.. 😱

Better not then, huh 😱

MRoogle results for mdworker

No need to go the Apple just yet, the problem is OS specific and not hardware related (meaning the hardware doesn't cause the problem, it solves it partially by spinning the fans), but software related, which can be solved by you, if you somehow know something about computers and researching.

Ah, thanks so much, now it finally clicked.

Yeah I kinda figured it'd be something to do with spotlight indexing, since it first started happening after a huge download (over 6 gigs) Though I was startled to find it persisted even after I'd closed down the torrenting software and left my computer for a while, then re-started it. Glad to hear nothing's broken though and I've just gotta wait it out.

mucho kudos! 🙂

 

[misterredman]

It may be a good idea to make a download folder for bittorrent and exclude it from spotlight indexing (especially if you don't need the search function for that folder).

 

[Insulin Junkie]

It may be a good idea to make a download folder for bittorrent and exclude it from spotlight indexing (especially if you don't need the search function for that folder).

Yeah though as long as I know that's what it is I don't mind at all, I'd like to have it indexed since the folder contains hundreds of educational audiobooks & PDF's I need to be able to find fast for when I'm researching for uni >.>

As if by magic my temperature just went down and is staying down. Must have just stopped indexing.

 

[misterredman]

Yeah though as long as I know that's what it is I don't mind at all, I'd like to have it indexed since the folder contains hundreds of educational audiobooks & PDF's I need to be able to find fast for when I'm researching for uni >.>

As if by magic my temperature just went down and is staying down. Must have just stopped indexing.

Ah, I see. Well in that case you will need the indexing for sure. 😀
An alternative is to move the finished download to another folder, where they will be indexed. I remember reading about problems between spotlight indexing a file that is being constantly modified while it is being downloaded. Was some time ago so it may have been resolved already.

But if it finished it probably means it is alright. The CPU usage should be much lower now, you can check that for confirmation.

 

[Insulin Junkie]

Ah, I see. Well in that case you will need the indexing for sure. 😀
An alternative is to move the finished download to another folder, where they will be indexed. I remember reading about problems between spotlight indexing a file that is being constantly modified while it is being downloaded. Was some time ago so it may have been resolved already.

But if it finished it probably means it is alright. The CPU usage should be much lower now, you can check that for confirmation.

That's an idea... might do that actually! I usually move the folders anyway, but never thought to exclude the download folder from being indexed. Thanks for the notion!

And yeah I did confirm that that's what it was when the temperature went back down, and it was 😱