[timmerk]

My roommates computer has been freezing up (well, almost - the GUI slows to a crawl - takes 1-2 min to open a menu) about once a day now in Tiger, clean install (no permission problems, no other apps, disk is fine, etc.)

Well, I could still SSH into it at full speeds and found disk i/o, ram, cpu were all fine and not consumed.

I killed the "qtimageserver" process and everything went back to normal speed. I have repeated this whenever it freezes/slows down and killing that process always fixes it.

This did not occur in 10.3, leading me to believe it is a bug in "qtimageserver." This would not surprise me, as my friend crafted a file that crashed my whole computer, due to qtimageserver because of the file.

Anyhow, I did more tests, and I could only get the qtimageserver process to invoke when I changed desktops. My roommate's desktop was set to change backgrounds every 5 min, and every 5 min, qtimageserver would start up again.

So, in conclusion, qtimageserver has a big, serious bug in OS X 10.4. The Apple people couldn't fix it for the life of them at the Apple store. As long as there is no qtimageserver trying to open, the computer does not freeze.

My questions are: A.) what exactly is this process? (everything I found on google is wrong), B.) how do I stop it from opening? could i delete it from the system? C.) if i did, what would stop working? D.) how do i report this bug to apple? i suspect it only occurs when the background changes automatically in 10.4, which is not something anyone would test for a few days, most likely.

Thanks

[Maflynn]

I've changed my desktop without any problems and/or slow downs.

[timmerk]

But did you have it set to auto desktop change every 5 min?

[cybergoober]

My laptop is set to change the Desktop Background every 5 minutes. No problems here...

Archive & Install

[timmerk]

hmm, maybe something else is wrong, but at least i am sure it is qtimageserver that is causing the problem.

[Fredo]

Try re-installing QuickTime.

[timmerk]

Doesn't fix the problem. Any other ideas? Does anyone know if qtimageserver source is in the Darwin source code? I couldn't find it.

[Chuckit]

To my recollection, qtimageserver is a strange daemon that's basically responsible for lots of little QuickTime-related things (like Finder icon previews). I'm sure it's not in Darwin (since Darwin doesn't include the GUI stuff), and my suspicion is that it's not really part of QuickTime either. I think it's a system component.

[timmerk]

It seems that at least in 10.4, it doesn't have anything to do with icon previews, because I quit it, and then previewed JPGs, PDFs, MP3s, movies, at it didn't re-open. Only when I changed the desktop, did it open.

[Chuckit]

I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. Movies, MP3s and PDFs don't have icon previews.

[timmerk]

Oh yah, but I also tried turning on "Show icon preview" in the Finder view options, and that didn't start up qtimageserver either.