[tastethepain]

I upgraded to Tiger last week. I just noticed that my CPU is hitting 100% a lot.

I recently uninstalled (and used Norton's uninstall script) to uninstall Norton Antivirus for the Mac.

Now, I see the a 'root' process called 'update' is hitting anywhere from 50%-90% CPU utilization. Whatever I seem to not need for my own processes, this 'update' process consumes the rest.

Anyone know what that process is? Is it Spotlight indexing everything on my PB? Is it a virus?

Any ideas, I would love them. I would love to reclaim some of my CPU to have it just sit idle.

Thanks,
Curtis

[eevyl]

Spotlight processes names start with "md", so it seems it's not its fault.

[TETENAL]

Is it possible that this process belongs to Nortin Antivirus? Tiger is not compatible with Antivirus software and the issue with Virex was that it takes all CPU time if I recall correctly. Maybe it's the same with Norton.

[slffl]

I am getting the same thing. As far as I can tell, it usually starts doing it when I quite iMovie and/or iDVD. And the only way to get rid of it is to manually power off. I can't force quit it and when I try to restart, it hangs at the 'wallpaper-only' screen. I've never installed Norton AV so I don't think that's the problem.

[tastethepain]

The only way that I eventually got rid of it was by leaving my Powerbook alone for some 10 hours.

It's been a couple of weeks since I did that and the CPU utilization settled down.

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by tastethepain

I upgraded to Tiger last week. I just noticed that my CPU is hitting 100% a lot.

I recently uninstalled (and used Norton's uninstall script) to uninstall Norton Antivirus for the Mac.

Now, I see the a 'root' process called 'update' is hitting anywhere from 50%-90% CPU utilization. Whatever I seem to not need for my own processes, this 'update' process consumes the rest.

Anyone know what that process is? Is it Spotlight indexing everything on my PB? Is it a virus?

Any ideas, I would love them. I would love to reclaim some of my CPU to have it just sit idle.

Thanks,
Curtis

This is what man pages are for:

UPDATE(8) BSD System Manager's Manual UPDATE(8)

NAME
update -- flush internal filesystem caches to disk frequently

SYNOPSIS
update [normal_interval [save_energy_interval]]

DESCRIPTION
The update command helps protect the integrity of disk volumes by flush-
ing volatile cached filesystem data to disk at thirty second intervals.
Update uses the sync(2) function call to do the task. The normal_inter-
val and save_energy_interval can be used to set the sync(2) interval in
seconds of the normal case and the case where the computer is trying to
save energy.

Update is commonly invoked at startup time by rc(8) when the system goes
multi-user.

SEE ALSO
sync(2), fsck(8), init(8), rc(8), sync(8)

BUGS
It is possible on some systems that a sync occurring simultaneously with
a crash may cause file system damage. See fsck(8).

HISTORY
An update command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.

So it was flushing cache for some reason. Perhaps it was running some of the periodic jobs, to do a little system maintenance. Sometimes this can take 20-30 minutes, if it hasn't been done in a long time, on slow hardware.

[Partisan01]

The first thing I did was read the man page then I scroll down and someone has already posted it.....nice

[davi]

I had the same problem with the unkillable "update" process regularly hijacking the entire processor on my iMac G3 400MHz after upgrading to Tiger over a Panther installation. It would occur at least daily and could only be stopped with a forced reboot.

This discussion at Apple put me on the right track to solving the problem:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]

Specifically, checking the system.log in Console revealed repeated errors such as:
"hotfiles_evict: err 28 relocating file 27611"
suggesting that the system was getting "stuck" while relocating (or flushing?) a certain file.
The discusion also suggested using hfsdebug from http://www.kernelthread.com/software/hfsdebug/ to identify the file and delete it manually.

Using hfsdebug in the Terminal, some users seem to be able to locate and delete the file while update is running, but no such luck for me. On my iMac, hfsdebug was unable to identify the file while the update process was running, so I had to record the file number from the error message, then run hfsdebug in the Terminal after force-rebooting the iMac. I was then able to locate and manually trash the offending file in the Finder.

If the file is one that you want to keep, duplicate it, delete the original, and replace it with the copy. update only seems to choke on very old files for me, so "renewing" the file by replacing it with a duplicate seems to make it update-friendly again.

This went on for a few days, with the update process reappearing every 12 hours or so, getting stuck on a new file. I noticed that the stuck file identification numbers were increasing (about a dozen files between 14931 and 112976), and that all of the files were quite old, created around 2001 or 2002. (I had not performed a clean install since the Public Beta days!) I have a 12" PowerBook with a clean install of Tiger, and that's update-problem free.

For a while I found these errors were caused by files in a certain (old) folder, so i just duplicated the whole folder and trashed the original, and update never got stuck in that folder again.

Well after a few days of catching the update process in the act and manually deleting the problem files, the problem went away. I'd love to say it's never been back, but every now and then it will reappear, usually getting stuck on an ancient file. But it's getting less and less frequent.

[Russian Mac fan]

Is this problem repeating with 10.4.2 or is all quiet now? I had this yesterday morning before I updated to 10.4.2

[tastethepain]

Since I just upgraded to 10.4.2, I can't tell yet.

[Russian Mac fan]

OK, fair enough. Do you think there's enough reason to believe that this problem will go away with this update?