[yongfook]

What is Tiger DOING?

Suddenly my HDD starts thrashing away and everything grinds to a halt. I look in activity monitor and there is a process called "find" using up half of my system resources.

What is "find"? Probably something to do with Spotlight I guess, but it already indexed my drive days ago. And I can't see any kind of visual sign of this process going on so that I can stop it - the only way would be to kill the process from activity monitor, but I don't even know what it IS so I don't know if it is safe to kill it!

Tiger, please stop doing things I don't ask for!

[Big Mac]

Find is, as its name implies, a (standard) CLI utility for finding files. It is a standard part of the OS. Spotlight may be using it, and if it's doing its thing you probably should leave it alone until iit's done.

[OreoCookie]

I had a hdd dying on me three days ago. Replace your harddrive and things will go back to normal.

[gregpins]

If you have Entourage, you should set Spotlight to NOT search the Microsoft User Data folder, usually located in your Documents folder. Spotlight cannot read Entourage data, but it tries nonetheless, which for me was causing a ton of drive activity including loud, scary, weird noises. It also caused general system slowness. I made the change in the Spotlight preferences pane, and things have been MUCH better.

[Ganesha]

Spotlight doesn't use find.

find, and just that, is run by the weekly maintenance task, among other things.

[barney ntd]

Exactly the same thing happened to me, and I tracked it down to the weekly maintenance task. It looks as though Apple has finally moved this from a middle-of-the-night cron job (which didn't happen if your computer was asleep) to some other scheduler. This means you no longer need a third-party program to do this, which is a good thing.

Didn't half worry me, though. I thought it might be malware!

Barney.

[rocky2]

I had the same happen with two Tiger installs over quite clean relatively new copies of 10.3.8 and 10.3.9 on two identical Maxtor drives that had once been part of an Apple software RAID.
The sympton was a click from the disk, then a lot of disk thrashing for a few second and then a non-responsive GUI for up to 20 seconds sometimes with spinning beachball and sometimes not.
After various types of troubleshooting, I finally solved it on both disks by formatting to zeros using the Tiger DVD Disk utility (7-way overwrite maybe) and then running a completely fresh install.
Never happened since and the OS seems more responsive too compared to the upgrade install.

[alphasubzero949]

Originally Posted by barney ntd

It looks as though Apple has finally moved this from a middle-of-the-night cron job (which didn't happen if your computer was asleep) to some other scheduler. This means you no longer need a third-party program to do this, which is a good thing.

What about anacron? Is it useless now?

[barney ntd]

Originally Posted by alphasubzero949

What about anacron? Is it useless now?

Well, I haven't installed it, but according to my log files, "daily" has run almost every day and "weekly" every Saturday since 30th April. I don't remember changing any settings which would affect the time they should run, so it looks as though Apple has done something.

Can anyone confirm this?

Barney.

[Angus_D]

It's probably run by launchd now, not cron.

[barney ntd]

Originally Posted by Angus_D

It's probably run by launchd now, not cron.

You're right: they're all there in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons.

So everyone: no more need for anacron!

Barney.