Tiger eats 100% CPU

Initially my Tiger install also had something sucking all it's cpu time. Activity monitor said processes "mds" and "mdimport" were my culprits. Search of Apple came up with one spotlight related page. Two days later my cpu is back to twiddling its thumbs waiting for me again--looks like spotlight is done indexing and hasn't come back that I've noticed.
 
lkrfan77 said:
I'm having this same problem. The "rogue" process seems to be something called "update." It's owner is root. It seems to take up the extra processing power that I'm not using, so it never totally gets in the way of other processes.

However, it presents a problem to have my processor running at 100% all the time because: a.) it gets too flippin hot and, more importantly, b.) it kills the amount of time I can get out of the battery.

Additionally, I've been having sporadic serious crashes. I think these may be do to virtual memory being used up and "thrashing," but I'm not sure. I seem to have problems especially with the Finder and with Open/Save dialogs in various programs, most notably Safari.
Click to expand...


I have a 1GB/1GB TiBook with exactly the same problem. It started running waaay too hot with Panther and it's almost unusable now with Tiger. The "update" process starts taking over within 15 mins of turning the machine on. I cannot restart with it, only a hard shutdown works. It runs with 60-70% CPU usage constantly and will not force quit in Activity Monitor. The aforementioned "mds" runs 20-25% at times but the problem is "update." However, my CPU is at 100% all the time.

I used to leave the machine on for a week, but now an hour is difficult. The fan even comes on if I have the thing sitting on an ice pack!

I have no 3rd-party plugins, no Virex or Macafee or anything else I've seen mentioned as possible culprits.

Any help is appreciated.
 
Many are just like you. I participate in several fora. As best I can determine, the fix is not yet known.
 
if anyone reading this can use a bit more info-

I download a lot of music via Bit Torrent (live shows from taper-friendly bands), which runs the hard drive constantly. Today I decided to dump these downloads off onto a FireWire drive and I have yet to have "update" start up. This process definitely only gets out of control when the hard drive is being used continually...

Still, in order to upload fairly, I need to run my machine overnight, so I need to let it run off the built-in. I hope Apple addresses this.

cheers-
 
I think this process gets out of control for me because the hard drive is being used continually for Virtual Memory.

Thus when running a lot of programs and moving swiftly around my computer, there is a lot of virtual memory in use. I have 768 mb of physical RAM on a 12" 1.33 ghz PB, and I never had problems with running out of memory while running upward of 10 programs on Panther.

My main problem of crashes is when I try to SAVE files in Safari when I have a lot of other windows/apps running. This is the most common crash. It seems not AS bad under 10.4.1 but it still happens (I just tested it by opening a bunch of windows/apps and trying to save a PDF in Safari).

Basically, Safari hangs and I get the spinning beach ball before the Save dialog box opens..
Waiting this out has no effect, so eventually I try to kill/quit Safari either through the menu bar, through Cmd + Q, through Force Quit via hot keys or thru the dock, etc.

Usually the force quit dialog will not even come up.

This is SERIOUSLY annoying. The beauty of switching to a mac for me was rock solid stability while running a myriad of programs. I'm not getting this w/ Tiger and am considering switching back to Panther.

I actually WORRY about my computer crashing CONSTANTLY. I HATE this. My computer crashes 2-3 times a day and can't even restart on its own..
 
lkrfan77 said:
I think this process gets out of control for me because the hard drive is being used continually for Virtual Memory.

Thus when running a lot of programs and moving swiftly around my computer, there is a lot of virtual memory in use. I have 768 mb of physical RAM on a 12" 1.33 ghz PB, and I never had problems with running out of memory while running upward of 10 programs on Panther.

My main problem of crashes is when I try to SAVE files in Safari when I have a lot of other windows/apps running. This is the most common crash. It seems not AS bad under 10.4.1 but it still happens (I just tested it by opening a bunch of windows/apps and trying to save a PDF in Safari).

Basically, Safari hangs and I get the spinning beach ball before the Save dialog box opens..
Waiting this out has no effect, so eventually I try to kill/quit Safari either through the menu bar, through Cmd + Q, through Force Quit via hot keys or thru the dock, etc.

Usually the force quit dialog will not even come up.

This is SERIOUSLY annoying. The beauty of switching to a mac for me was rock solid stability while running a myriad of programs. I'm not getting this w/ Tiger and am considering switching back to Panther.

I actually WORRY about my computer crashing CONSTANTLY. I HATE this. My computer crashes 2-3 times a day and can't even restart on its own..
Click to expand...

I don't have this problem you pointed out (on either my G5 or Tibook). You might want to list your computer specs. Something is going wrong on YOUR system.
 
I gave my specs: a 12" PB 1.33 ghz w/ 768 mb of memory.

I entered Macintosh HD as a folder that Spotlight shouldn't index and I was not able to crash my computer after that. So, update seems to be related to keeping the Spotlight index up to date. The only problem with disabling Spotlight is that my Mail messages are not even catalogued so I cannot search them within Mail.

I think part of the reason I would get Safari crashes from the Save dialog is due to the Spotlight search box in open/save dialogs in Tiger.

Tonight I'm going to try to recatalog my hard drive to see if that will improve performance. All in all, this is very disappointing and I'm still thinking about making the jump back to Panther.
 
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