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I've been compared to Buckaroo Banzai, but better at neurosurgery, physics, music, and racing cars.
They're making a comic book based on me. To do justice to the subject, top scientists under my direction are cloning Leonardo da Vinci from skin cells caught under the paint of the Mona Lisa.
The painting itself is being destroyed for the greater good.
Search all of posterous for node/25 »
Spotlight indexing problem solved
In a previous episode, our hero was having trouble with Spotlight. Specifically, for those of you too besotted to remember, mdimport was spiking up to 35% CPU usage every few minutes.
I tried some voodoo, such as reducing the Mail.app IMAP polling frequency, but the problem seemed to persist. I hate CPU meters, but I kept Activity Monitor running, complete with its stupid Dock icon, just so I could catch mdimport in action.
And catch it, I did.
I waited until I saw the CPU usage spike (not that it was really difficult, as it made its presence known by slowing down EVERY app running on the Mac) and ran a simple program: lsof -c mdimport. lsof is one of the fifteen most useful Unix apps I know, along with screen, awk, sed, seq, route, ssh, netcat, e/f/grep, etc. What this did was LiSt every Open File associated with the (-c)ommand "mdimport". Over several iterations, I noticed that the AddressBook.data file was constantly being accessed. This made sense, because maybe it updates entries every time a mail is received. Who knows.
The other frequent entries were a few .DS_Store files on one of my external drives. Specifically, .DS_Store files in directories I had either backed up or copied from my PowerBook HD onto the external drive to save space on the laptop and avoid fragmentation.
Apparently, mdimport was puking on these files. I didn't have the foresight to check the obvious -- that maybe they had an m/c/atime in the future, although it's impossible that mdimport relies upon them. If it did, indexing your hard drive would be like painting the Golden Gate Bridge -- just as it finished traversing the directory hierarchies, it would have to start over.
Regardless of the problem, I just deleted the .DS_Store files that were showing up. They weren't important, as I don't customise my folder views much beyond "show me column view for this one, show me thumbnails for this one."
Boom, problem solved. No more 35% mdimport spikes. Now I have the usual pain, like iTerm taking up too much CPU when scrolling text, but it has tabs, I can tab away from the updating window, and the usage goes down. At least I don't have evil background apps clawing away at me.
Oh, and one fool asked today why I never put up a feed for my blog. It's right here doofball. It's also right over there in the navbar.
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