It seems that processes can steal CPU time without appearing in top or Activity Monitor. Frankly I find this unacceptable. Eve has been attacked by a rogue process recently (40% load when idle) yet I’m not able to determine what it is.
I initially suspected spotlight. I had installed a game (NeverWinter Nights) on my Windows partition and I figured it was indexing it. My suspicions moved to the distributed network build client in XCode 2.3. It could even be an interaction between one of Personal File Sharing, Windows Sharing, Personal Web Sharing (PHP enabled) and distributed builds.
Turning off all of spotlight, distributed builds (manual kill required) and sharing lets the machine idle properly. I’m currently uninstalling XCode 2.3 to see if it is the cause of my problems (it is a recent problem and I only recently installed XCode 2.3).
Update 1 June 2006
It is definitely something in XCode 2.3. I noticed some daemons relating to distributed network building. They don’t even stop running when you turn off distributed building in XCode. It’s probably something to do with my network setup. I really hate crap like this. I left feedback so hopefully Apple will fix this for the next XCode release.
Yup, saw the same thing here. I thinks it’s the distccd daemon. Very annoying.
Can’t you just turn off the distcc daemon using Xcode’s prefs? I have 2.3 installed, and have disabled all the options in the distributed build preferences and it seems OK for me.
It’s not the distcc daemon since that’s been around for years. It’s the new network build daemon (XCode 2.3 is the first version to include it). There were at least 2 processes relating to it that would start at boot time no matter what the XCode prefs were.