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allenawatson

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 22, 2011
9
0
Has anyone beside me noticed how "Folder Actions Dispatcher" is at the top of the CPU used list in Activity Monitor? It is routinely using 75% to 80% of a CPU.:(
 

allenawatson

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 22, 2011
9
0
Getting rid of folder actions

Do you have any folder actions installed?

Took me a month to get back to this issue, but the answer is, Yes I have folder actions installed. I did it so long ago I don't recall how, nor how to get rid of them. I'd be happy to do that. I am using Hazel for that kind of thing now.
 

gboudreau

macrumors newbie
Oct 1, 2014
1
0
To disable it, right-click any folder in Finder, go to Services > Folder Actions Setup... Close the Choose a Script to Attach window, then uncheck the Enable Folder Actions checkbox at the top. Voilà!
 

TreoRenegade

macrumors regular
Aug 7, 2008
181
3
In case someone else bumps into this thread.... I have 16gigs RAM re my iMac, yet every morning post-Yosemite upgrade, I noticed (via Memory Clean) that free memory was down to the double-digit MB range. A check via Activity Monitor showed that “Folder Actions Dispatcher” was consuming in excess of 85% CPU! :confused:

Googling led me to a Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/2jlbik/yosemite_high_cpu_usage_by_folder_actions/, which references a certain preferences file. Peeking inside of it, I found one folder listed. I visited that folder, unchecked the Enable Folder Actions box, and the next morning, joy!

(I take this opportunity to extend my public thanks to WinWoes, which yielded a couple of decades worth of troubleshooting skills, even for this non-programmer.)
 

xgman

macrumors 603
Aug 6, 2007
5,697
1,425
I had a folder action to watch the startup and launch folders for new additions. very useful. NOW, I had to disable it due to the ridiculous high and prolonged cpu use, even when no folder actions were called for. I hope they can fix this.
 

MacGyver-IT

macrumors newbie
Feb 3, 2015
1
0
Kentucky
Me Too - and Thanks

I just finally got around to upgrading to Yosemite on my MacBook Pro and my CPU temp spiked (as monitored by iStat).

After a day of digging, finding this post, and realizing that the "Folder Items Dispatcher" was not similar to the Windows "System Idle Process" disabling the Folder Actions cured by CPU high heat problem.

I upgraded a second MacBook Air at the same time and it had no CPU problems BUT the Folder Actions check box was unchecked at the point of the upgrade. Just for fun I checked it on the Air and Activity Monitor showed the Folder Item Dispatcher at nearly zero CPU. I rechecked it on my MacBook Pro, the pinwheel started, and the CPU spiked for about 30 seconds, and now it is back to normal.

I have an aftermarket SSD in my Early 2011 MacBook Pro. About 7 months ago I upgraded my older aftermarket SSD to a larger one using SuperDuper!. At that point I was experiencing very high CPU use. That problem was caused by some old cache files that needed to be rebuilt with this terminal command:

sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force

Tech Support from Shirt-Pocket Software (author of SuperDuper!) were great. I struggled for several days and considered removing the SSD, which was a different brand. I finally sent a tech support request to Shirt-Pocket to ask if something could have happened during the disk cloning and in just a few minutes they said "Try This". Bingo and fixed.

It seems now that my VMWare Fusion is eating a little extra CPU because of a Windows process but this one seems manageable and maybe even a Windows issue.

Thanks.
 
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