Serious Tiger Slowdown - CPU and disk usage

Lt Major Burns

Lt Major Burns

"Dicky" Charlteston-Burns
Right i seem to be the only one where tiger is a hell of a lot slower than panther.

it is now constantly writing about 1.8mb-5.8mb to the disk every second (according to activity monitor) and the cpu fans spin up every 10 seconds or so to full speed (bloody noisy).

in activity monitor ATSServer is the CPU hog, taking up to 73% cpu quite often - it is this that's making the fans spin up. i have no idea whats causing the disk to write that much data constantly. is spotlight still indexing? because it's giving no indication that it is. i've now got activity monitor running constantly to monitor this.

i've tried force quitting ATSServer, but it just reopens and carries on doing it's intensive work (what the hell is it, and will it ever stop?)
I've rebooted, run disk permissions repair, both in disk utility and off the boot cd.... i don't know what else to do

(edit) also running unknown in the activity monitor is "mdimport" i don't know what this is, but it's also the only using system resources
 
It's Spotlight indexing your drive. It'll stop after a while. Click the Spotlight icon at the top right and it gives you an estimate of how long it'll take to finish indexing.

Tiger will be faster once that's done because there won't be constant disk activity.
 
it has stopped now. it possible was that - i got an "indexing" thing, but it said indexing ipod, so i stopped it (just the ipod, i excluded it from spotlight, as it's going to be wiped). after that it gave me no indication it was indexing, and was really pissing me off. is that what ATSServer was?
 
ATS has to do with fonts etc., I believe. "Apple Type Server"? Or something like that. But I'm really only guessing right now. Could look it up, but ain't got the time right now.
 
i was having some real problems with type at the time - illustrator was just refusing to use the type i wanted, instead making everything (*shudder*) myriad..... it seems to be better now though. cheers guys. one more notch in the bed - of knowledge!
 
ive been having some 'slowdown' issues too...

three times now, while im using AIM it'll respond slow as i type. i quickly opened the activity monitor and noticed AIM's CPU % is above 60 (only as i try to use it, if it sits idle, its fine). first i tried just closing the chat window and when that didnt work, i quit it, relaunched and then its fine again.

something similar happened with photoshoop 7 (but i didnt catch it in the activity monitor..... yet). i was working on a picture, clicked the desktop to check something else, and when i went back in pshop, its slowed down and i got the beach ball for a few seconds. i let it sit there and it went back to normal after about 30 seconds.

im using a 667 powerbook DVI and i did a clean install of tiger. im thinking maybe i should do another clean install and see if that fixes it...... unless someone has any ideas?
 
I just did a clean install of Tiger as well and everything's fine on my PowerBook but my iMac is making a lot of noise like it's doing something. I've tried restarting it twice and it still does it. I checked the process list and ATSServer is the only thing that takes up a lot of CPU and it jumps from 20 up to 60%.

Any idea how to fix this? I haven't installed any additional fonts so it's just the system fonts that are installed.
 
I was having the issue too where my computer was accessing the disk constantly and the perfomance bogged down.

Here's an odd thing to check (It fixed it for me) Do you have "calculate all sizes" turned on in your view options? for some reason when I upgraded to Tiger, it just kept calculating and never seems to stop. (even if you switch to another app after looking at a window)

If you uncheck that box, after 5 minutes or so, the disk activity should stop.
 
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