[kman42]

I noticed that my activity monitor was going crazy this morning when I woke up my PB. A closer look revealed that a process called DirectoryService is using everything it can. Can someone fill me in on what this process does?

thanks,
kman

[Ryan Becker]

Originally posted by kman42:
I noticed that my activity monitor was going crazy this morning when I woke up my PB. A closer look revealed that a process called DirectoryService is using everything it can. Can someone fill me in on what this process does?

thanks,
kman

Is this in Panther? Panther does some auto directory repairing, so I would think it has to do with that. Maybe something to do with journaling or the way Panther auto-defrags small files?

-Ryan

[CatOne]

Originally posted by kman42:
I noticed that my activity monitor was going crazy this morning when I woke up my PB. A closer look revealed that a process called DirectoryService is using everything it can. Can someone fill me in on what this process does?

thanks,
kman

Directory Service discovers user/service information. You account information is stored in NetInfo on your laptop, by default. Directory Service knows how to get this info out of NetInfo.

If you were connecting to a Mac server for centralized management, your user info might be stored in Open Directory on an Xserve. As such, Directory Service would go query the LDAP server to find out who you were and let you log in.

But this is an the "what", not the "how do I fix it."

I'd suggest you run the "Directory Access" application in Applications/Utilities. If your machine is standalone, and you are not connecting to old OS 9 machines, etc., you may want to turn everything off (but Rendezvous). That is, uncheck NetInfo (because this is for finding a NetInfo server... different than your local machine), uncheck LDAPv3, uncheck AppleTalk, etc. Note this will NOT disable these services, it will just disable "directory lookups" for these services, which will be wasteful if you're not using these services.

If you turn off Rendezvous, it will probably bite you later, because auto-discovery of things like printers won't work (and you'll wonder why you can't see it, and you won't remember you turned it off ;-) But turn everything else off... it's probably stuck searching for something it can't find.

[kman42]

Originally posted by CatOne:
I'd suggest you run the "Directory Access" application in Applications/Utilities. If your machine is standalone, and you are not connecting to old OS 9 machines, etc., you may want to turn everything off (but Rendezvous). That is, uncheck NetInfo (because this is for finding a NetInfo server... different than your local machine), uncheck LDAPv3, uncheck AppleTalk, etc. Note this will NOT disable these services, it will just disable "directory lookups" for these services, which will be wasteful if you're not using these services.

So I turned off everything except Rendezvous and I lost a bunch of servers that used to appear under the Network icon. Some of them come back if I turn on SLP, but I'm not sure what that does. Turning Appletalk on and off in Directory Access doesn't seem to have any effect.

kman

[CatOne]

Originally posted by kman42:
So I turned off everything except Rendezvous and I lost a bunch of servers that used to appear under the Network icon. Some of them come back if I turn on SLP, but I'm not sure what that does. Turning Appletalk on and off in Directory Access doesn't seem to have any effect.

kman

SLP (Service Location Protocol) is an old discovery service, which provides for service discovery over IP. It's the "old way" and I'm assuming it's discovering lots of OS 9 based servers, or some such.

You can find some details on it if you want -- go to the Apple Knowledge Base and search for "SLP."

[TonTaub]

DirectoryService went CPU-hungry when I started the Apache server.
But stopping the personal webservice didn't ease the CPU-load.

EDIT: I just rebooted my PoBo, DirectoryService now behaves.
I'll retry that.

EDIT2: I reenabled Personal Web Sharing and DirectoryService still is tame. I suspected that accessing the webservice caused this problem, but I couldn't reproduce it.
BTW, when I shut down the PoBo before, it was stuck. Just Background and the mousepointer were visible. I had to press the power button for a long time to switch off and restart the system.

Michael.