Leopard Trifecta
2008-01-14 09:28AM PST/Home
I know I should be thinking about what wonderful new products will be released in tomorrow's keynote, but I gotta say, the one thing I'd like more than any other is a more stable Leopard. I spent the weekend battling, what turned out to be three different issues. I did a clean install of Leopard just last week on our home Mini.
Issue 1: Spotlight
Spotlight was repeatedly launching mdworkers who would soak up a bunch of resources shortly before falling on their own swords, only to be relaunched again. And again. Meanwhile the beach ball spun, and an error about mdworker exiting on error was in the system logs. No mention of what the mdworker was trying to do when it croaked, that would be asking too much. My new favorite command, this turns off Spotlight on the main drive:
sudo mdutil -i off /
and this, which blows away the, presumably corrupt index.
sudo mdutil -E /
Issue 2: Microsoft's Update Utility
Microsoft's update utility had gone crazy, soaking up most of my system's memory. I killed that sucker faster than you can say "Rosetta".
Issue 3: iTunes
It was tossing strange error messages about not being able to read/write to the drive. A quick Yahoo! search revealed that this can happen during podcast updates, so I nuked all our podcast subscriptions.
After all that, things seem to be working again. But I've got Spotlight disabled, Microsoft's update utility killed, and no podcasts. But at least I can use the box, instead of staring at the beach ball while iTunes tossed strange error messages every 20 minutes or so.