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Help! Finder consuming all available CPU power

M

miradu

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 21, 2003
39
0
Ok, I need help with this please.

Here's the problem:

Finder is consuming up to 100% of my CPU, non-stop. According to activity monitor this is under the "system %" category.. my graph is 75% red at this time, where in the last 8 months it has normally been around 10%. Right now it's at 86.5%, and when I do a heavier task it might go down to 40%, but it is taking up a lot of extra power, that when needed by applications is unavailable. It's making things extremely slow, and extremely hot.

Here's what I have:

12 inch Powerbook G4, 1 Ghz, Rev B.
10.3 with all of the latest updates.
No hardware plugged in.. no other software running other than finder and safari.

So far I've done:

The problem persists after rebooting, after relaunching finder. I also ran sytem optimizer x 4.1, and it fixed a lot of permissions and optimized apps, but didn't help my Finder problem.

I'm stuck, because 1) I'm on a laptop, and 100% CPU utill all the time, kills my battery life. I onyl get 90 minutes right now. 2) I do video and photo work and I neeed every last bit of CPU power I can get, today my powerbook was almost unuseable because finder insisted on taking up half of the CPU power, even when photoshop was trying to use it all.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this, aside from reinstalling 10.3, please help me.

Thank you!
 
your wouldn't

you wouldn't happen to have file fault on, or installed any third party apps that play with the OS settings.

That system optimizer might even be the problem. Use disk utility by itself and check your permissions.
 
No file vault, no third party utils really.

I used that system optimizer x program just an hour ago, after spending all day dealing with the problem; thus system optimizer is not at fault.
 
hhmmm... i've had the same problem occasionally. PB 1.25GHz OS 10.3.4 here. usually if i just force quit the Finder and let it restart it's all OK. i don't know what causes it, i'll take note of what apps i have open next time it happens.

and you say that it doesn't fix itself even after a reboot? very strange... you could also search the Apple.com forums for some answers... or Apple KnowlegeBase.
 
okay, i have that same problem again, just started about 30 minutes ago.

i was using Safari, had about 8-9 tabs open (that's not too much... right???) and then it just got really slow and it wouldn't load pages at the normal speed either...

also, i tried to quit Mail but the windows of it just closed but the icon in the Dock still had the arrow under it, and i could still switch to Mail and the menubar was still there. the only way to quit it is to Force Quit... which can't be good.

i also had top running, and it said that it was kernel_task that was taking all of the CPU, and my load averages were up at about 13 or 14! :eek:

also i've got Panther on a seperate partition, only 200MB left on there. :p perhaps that is part of my problem? miradu, do you happen to be using partitoins? just curious...


well this weekend i'll try to re-install Panther and re-size the partiton to make some more room for it anyways.

i've also rebooted now, and that didn't help, so i guess it's gotten serious :( has anyone else had this issue or know what's causing it?
 
I have not had this problem (but then again, I might just not have noticed... running F@H)

Does the problem persist in a NEW user? (System Preferences > Accounts > New User Make it an admin, and make sure everyone else is logged out)
 
That's it! No I don't have partitions, but when I logged into a new user it was gone. When I logged back into my user it was also gone! A corrupted preference file perhaps? This was just so weird because it persisted through reboots and everything, I'm surprised creating a new user and logging in and out fixed it, but it did. Thank you so much!
 
:D creating a new user, logging in, and logging out should not have fixed it, but since it did, just do that.

If the problem persists after you create a new user (but only in your account) delete your_user_name > library > preferences

If the problem persists in both users, delete HD > System > library > preferences (I know the first will only make you reset your user preferences, and will otherwise do only good to your machine. The second, however, I do not know about, have not done myself, and would involve systemwide preferences. I can not assure you that nothing would go wrong. You would then need to restart your computer for changes to take effect)
 
I found that deleting the finder preferences fixed the problem.

I noticed a few days later that it started doing it again when I opened up my photos folder; the CPU would sit at 100% while it was generating icon previews for each picture file. The stupid thing was that the CPU stayed at 100% after it finished generating previews for all the files in that folder. (Maybe OSX is trying to be smart and generate icon previews for other files in advance?)

Anyway I disabled the "show icon preview" option in the View Options (CMD-J) for all folders, and the problem stopped.

EDIT:

I just updated from OSX 10.3.3 to 10.3.4 in the hope that this bug may have been fixed. Guess what? It has been fixed (and icon previews are generated a lot faster too), but now it sends the CPU to 100% when "show item info" is enabled :mad:
 
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