10.4: Non-installed corrupt fonts may choke Spotlight

May 18, '05 09:21:00AM

Contributed by: LRHann

Tiger only hintI did a clean install of Tiger on a friend's 1.5GHz PowerBook. Initially everything looked great, 10.4 is even faster than 10.3.9. Then I started building the home folder, adding documents, photos and music. Still great. Then I added a folder for some older software, including fonts. Within minutes, CPU activity was hitting 90% according to MenuMeters. Activity Monitor showed two processes using most of the CPU: ATSServer and mdimport.

Spotlight was indexing the new material, and when it hit the old fonts, some of which were likely corrupt, ATSServer started thrashing and eating CPU time. I grabbed all the old fonts and threw them into the trash and emptied it. Remember, these fonts weren't installed in any fonts folder. They were just sitting in an archive folder for possible future use, simply on the machine.

Here's the interesting part: as the trash emptied, I could see CPU usage ramping down in Activity Monitor, like a fire going out. When the trash was almost empty, I got a message saying (three font names) couldn't be deleted because they were in use. I waited a few moments, emptied the trash again, and the three remaining fonts were deleted. Since then, the system has been fast, stable, and trouble-free. CPU usage is typically just a couple percent at idle. Kudos to Apple for an outstanding new OS X!

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050508172157483