The crazy thing I did to fix Yosemite performance

[Jeff Singleton]

On 11/2/14 12:57 PM, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Sunday November 02 2014 12:06:35 Jeff Singleton wrote:
>
>> Back story: In an attempt to figure out why the services mds and
>> mdworker were running away with my CPU. Nothing I did resolved this,
>> including putting every single folder except /Applications in the
>> exception list for Spotlight. This is where I started editing
>
> Did that include switching off indexing for the whole (boot) disk (mdutil -i off) followed by a reboot? That ought to have wiped your spotlight folder, presuming that the most likely performance culprit would be updating an existing (huge) database file ...
>
> R.
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Trust me.  I tried everything. Resetting the SMC, PRAM, permissions, 
manually deleting the .Spotlight folder from /. Anything I could find on 
any Apple related blog/forum, I tried it.

Even going so far as to exclude lots of folders from my home Library 
folder, the same for System Library folder, my external drive, Bootcamp 
partition...none of it mattered.

The only thing that had any affect was to stop the mdworker services and 
the syslogd service. That is the only time the CPU usage dropped and the 
fans started slowing. Of course, right after I rebooted, they started 
back up again.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I probably forgot to revert an edit 
on one of the plist files and thats when it stopped booting to the GUI. 
Single-user mode was the only way, which required manually mounting my 
external drives and copying my user folder to it.

Booted to my Mavericks USB installer, completely wiped the main drive, 
installed Mavericks, and upgraded to Yosemite. Then booted to 
single-user again, and restored my user home folder.

 From that point, mdworker did its initial indexing, and then dropped 
down to normal usage. Now the fans only spin up when I am actually doing 
something like compiling something under MacPorts.

Jeff