Tag Archives: Mac OS X

Is mds thrashing your OS X?

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I use iStatsMenu to keep an eye on my RAM and CPU usage on my Mac Book Pro (which is no slouch with a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo Processor and 4 GB of RAM). There are three processes always seem to peg my machine:

  • Firefox
  • TextMate
  • and something called mds

Saving my work and restarting Firefox and Textmate is a no brainer, but I didn’t know what or how to address the problem with mds. Come to find out, mds is responsible for indexing in Spotlight. If its thrashing your CPU and hogging up your RAM, you may need to verify your dives with Disk Utility.app, but for a quick fix run this in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -a -v -i off

This will turn off indexing and you should see an immediate drop in usage and let you get back to work.

4 Easy Steps to Free Up Hard Drive Space on your Mac OS X Hard Drive

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My hard drive space was rapidly depleting on my MacBook Pro, and needed to free up some space quickly. I decided to crowd source the answer, and my #lazyweb tweet resulted in some great pointers from my friends @markjaquith, @80085, and @lesmothian.

Here is how I freed over 16gb of space on my OS X Startup Disc.

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XServe Virtual Hosting by Media Temple

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xv.jpg

Now this is cool. Media Temple, in partnership with Parallels, is going to soon be offering XServe virtual hosting with the ability to scale up to a full XServe’s worth of power and server resources. Offering everything an XServe has, including serving multiple web sites (including built-in wikis and blogs, whatever that means), iCal Server, Directory, and Time Machine backups – I’m hoping that it will prove to be useful for small group ware work and personal site hosting.

You can apply for the Private Beta here.

Apple updates iLife, iWork

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iLife '08 & iWork '08 Apple released a ton of updates last night to its popular iLife ’08 and iWork ’08 suites. All of the programs were updated (and iLife had two updates rolled out). Details are scant, but the updates promise to improve overall stability, and increase compatibility. iPhoto sees new greeting card templates for the Holidays, while iMovie sees a few features return from previous versions, such as manual audio fades and still frame creation. Other updates were not as significant. There was also a firmware upgrade for Core 2 Duo iMacs, MacBooks, and MacBook Pros.