I think mdworker is some kind of spotlight indexing process and there
are lots of complaints in forums about if flying off the handle and
consuming lots of resources (both CPU and RAM). One common cause is 3rd
party backup systems which create local index files which change all the
time causing trouble for Spotlight. Excluding those seems to help.
CB
On 12/11/12 11:38 AM, Paul Erkens wrote:
Hi Chris,
That will do it. You helped me getting started in terminal some time ago, and
yes I've become somewhat comfortable there now. Compared to dos using braille,
I'm still dealing with some inconveniences, but I learned many things, and
something again today. The first time I tried your hint, I got loads of error
messages, illegal operation. And of course, I forgot the sudo prefix, despite
your clear instruction. Hmm. But the second time it worked like a charm. I
don't know what dmworker is, but again I now have something to go after. Thanks.
Paul.
On Dec 11, 2012, at 5:15 PM, Chris Blouch <[email protected]> wrote:
For me the usual culprit is Time Machine which does a backup each hour and
makes things sludgy when it is running. I've also heard that the 'mds' process
is Spotlight indexing the hard drive and that can slow things down. Another
problem is if you get low on memory the OS will swap pages of memory that
haven't been used recently out to disk to free up more space. Then when you go
back to an app that used those pages of memory the OS will swap them back in.
So if you're low on RAM there can be a lot of page swapping or thrashing which
can bring any system to a crawl. Activity monitor only shows processes by CPU
use, not by disk activity, but sometimes those correlate. If you're ok with
playing around in terminal you can do
sudo iotop 10 1
sudo is "super user do" because this command can only be run by the root account, so it
should prompt for your administrator password. iotop is like activity monitor but for disk
activity. The first number is how many seconds to sample. The second number is how many samples to
do. If you leave the second number off it will keep doing 10 second samples until you stop it
running with control-C. You should get a 9 column output with spaces between each value. The last
column is the number of bytes read by the process during the sample period with the process with
the highest byte count last. You can do a "man iotop" for more details.
CB
On 12/11/12 10:45 AM, Paul Erkens wrote:
Dear listers,
My hard disk is working constantly, without me knowing what the heck it's
doing. To my knowledge, I don't have disk intensive background stuff
deliberately turned on. I know I'll have to get this from activity monitor, but
I don't know how to find the info I'm looking for. No matter how I sort the
table of processes, new ones are added all the time, while others get removed,
and so it is hard to focus on items inside the processes table with voiceover.
How do you deal with this? I.e.: finding out which process is using the hard
disk so intensively that it's getting hard to do work in the foreground?
Paul.
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