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My Macbook Pro (10.6.8) locks up every day at noon for several minutes (and often after sleep).
I put 'Activity Monitor' up front right before noon sorted by %CPU, and saw that it ran 'fsck_hfs'. Kinda makes sense that this would make my machine unusable.
I can kinda simulate this behavior by running it by hand (or 'Disk Utility').
What is making the Mac run a disk check so often, and how do I stop/delay/fix the root cause?
There's nothing in root's crontab, and Disk Utility reports the disk is fine. I also single-user booted and ran '/sbin/fsck -fy' with no errors reported.
I do see some "LSOF: File foo left open on device" errors from 'mds' around this time - not sure if related.
Rafi Jacoby
Posted 2013-01-28T18:08:42.513
Reputation: 111
And what is the parent process of
fsck_hfs? Maybe this gives you a hint which other process startsfsck_hfs... – jaume – 2013-01-28T19:09:15.783An excellent question - since Activity Monitor doesn't show parent process and everything is locked I can't see it within there. Maybe I'll have to use 'top' next time. – Rafi Jacoby – 2013-01-28T20:23:25.710
I'd use
ps -efinstead oftop... – jaume – 2013-01-28T20:32:34.150How would I use 'ps -ef' when the machine is locked up? Is there a run-in-a-loop behavior like 'top' that I'm missing in the flags? – Rafi Jacoby – 2013-01-28T21:15:46.453
Open a terminal and type
while :; do date; ps -ef; sleep 2; done. The while loop prints all processes every two seconds until you press Ctrl-C. Or you could send the output to a file:while :; do date; ps -ef; sleep 2; done > ~/ps-ef_output.txt. – jaume – 2013-01-28T21:24:34.827