rMBP Fan freakout

[mattxi]

Hey hey.

My brand new rMBP 15/16/512/2.6i7 came in the mail last night. Set it up, everything was working great, but while boujou was working on tracking in the background, I was just on the interwebs, when SUDDENLY my fans began going insane. Super fast, super loud, pretty concerning. It only happened once, then it seemed to get a hold of itself.

Might anyone see that there's somethin wrong?

 

[Krazy Bill]

When your mac does this, you need to run "Activity Monitor" to see which app/process is taxing your CPU (which in turn ramps up the fan).

 

[Queen6]

Nope, your system was likely indexing, this consumes a lot of CPU cycles. File indexing is a continuous process, however on a new machine the first run may take some time and your Mac will get hot and the fans will spool up, as the entire drive is indexed.

As you add more applications, the system will automatically index the files for rapid search, Spotlight etc

 

[mattxi]

Alrighty.

I had just done a huge (80gb) FireWire transfer to the SSD to get it all setup and whatnot from my iMac. So hopefully it was just indexing! But I'll run the monitor too, see what was up.

Thanks!

 

[switon]

RE: a proposal...

Hi mattxi,

Let me propose a hypothesis...

On a brand new rMBP that you just setup, the Spotlight indexing has yet to be performed. So if you had checked your Activity Monitor, I bet you would have found "mds", "mdworker", "mdworker32", and maybe even several instantiations of these using up a significant amount of CPU load. This would spin up your fans in a hurry, but once you started doing something else on your new rMBP then the Spotlight indexing gets moved to the background (high nice value) as your interactive tasks take precedence over the indexing and thus the fans slow almost immediately.

I think this is normal behavior and I would not worry about it. Next time your fans spin up to full speed and you don't think you have caused it by watching a flash video on the Internet or Handbraking a video, then start the Activity Monitor as others have suggested and see what is utilizing your CPU cycles.

Regards and enjoy your new rMBP,
Switon

 

[mattxi]

Thank you! I'm assuming this was the indexing, and if it continues to arise I'll bring it in!

Thanks everybody

 

[Queen6]

Thank you! I'm assuming this was the indexing, and if it continues to arise I'll bring it in!

Thanks everybody

Dont worry about it, the fans spooling up is a normal function of the Mac`s cooling system as loads increase. I would be far more concerned if the fans rpm`s, didn't increase. In general the new Retina`s have far better thermal management than previous MacBook`s especially given the performance on offer.