The crazy thing I did to fix Yosemite performance

[Michael Crawford]

Your user folder from your original installation will include a lot of
settings, preferences and the like from applications that were part of
your older OS install.  Potentially that might not be what you want, I
don't really know.

Recent versions of OS X hide your ~/Library folder in the Finder, but
you can get into it with:

   $ cd ; open Library

There is a lot of stuff in there, put there by Apple or by third-party
App developers.  I don't think it's such a good idea that the Library
folder is completely hidden, as most users won't know it's there,
won't know to back it up and so on.  But of course Apple figures
everyone just uses Spotlight.  :-/

I don't use Spotlight, I have grey hair, my face is getting wrinkled
so I drop .tar.gzs onto USB sticks.

Mike
Michael David Crawford
mdcrawford at gmail.com
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/

   Available for Software Development in the Portland, Oregon Metropolitan
Area.


On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 4:54 PM, Jeff Singleton <gvibe06 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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