OS X slows down every day at midnight?

In about 50 minutes from now (it's 11:06 PM) my machine will slow down. It does this every night at the exact same time.

Is OSX indexing or what is going on and what can I do about it?

ThomPete

Posted 2011-01-20T22:08:02.353

Reputation: 143

1Open up Activity Monitor and sort all processes by CPU usage. When your computer slows down, find the offending process. – NReilingh – 2011-01-20T22:15:18.993

Answers

Your computer is running the periodic daily scripts. These just clean up temporary files, caches, and do other daily maintenance. You can read more about it on Apple's site here.

squircle

Posted 2011-01-20T22:08:02.353

Reputation: 6 365

Never knew about that before... thanks for providing that info! – nhinkle – 2011-01-20T23:25:25.430

Nope, this isn't it; the daily (and weekly) periodic scripts don't run at midnight, they run at 3:15 am, and the monthly one runs at 5:30 am (see the Additional Information section of the linked article, or the actual launchd files in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-*.plist). – Gordon Davisson – 2011-01-21T08:14:25.643

Gordon is correct, the dailies run at 03:15 each day. I know this because I set up a script that would mount my Ext. FW HDD when daily script ran, and the HDD always mounted at 03:15. – penguirl – 2011-01-21T09:29:41.223

If you want to make them happen when you're free to take the performance hit, type sudo periodic daily into the terminal.

tobylane

Posted 2011-01-20T22:08:02.353

Reputation: 1 271