[hyperb0le]

I just noticed an unusual amount of hard drive activity. When I checked Activity Monitor, there is a process called "find" which is owned by user:nobody that is taking anywhere between 20% and 70% CPU and is making frequent requests to the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what this is?

[Detrius]

This is part of the nightly maintenance processes run by cron. This specific one enables you to use 'locate' at the command line to find files quickly. Of course, the database is only updated once ever 24 hours, and then only if your machine is running in the middle of the night. It's handy if it's kept up-to-date.

[Catfish_Man]

I had it running at 1PM recently... I suspect that launchd is launching the weekly script at the wrong time.

[hyperb0le]

Okay, thanks for the responses. It's good to know that nothing's wrong. I, too, though believe launchd must be running the scripts at the wrong time. Yesterday's cron tasks apparently ran at 10:30pm... I usually have to run them manually, since I sleep my machine at night. Oh well

[Mithras]

Note that the new launchd in 10.4.2 supposedly catches up on missed scheduled tasks.

[hyperb0le]

Originally Posted by Mithras

Note that the new launchd in 10.4.2 supposedly catches up on missed scheduled tasks.

Thanks for the information. That's certainly a welcome change.