Way to trace the reason ‘fseventsd’ process hogs CPU

snow leopard

I run Mac OSX 10.6 and noticed that a process 'fseventsd' was taking 100% CPU and 1.5G RAM. Doing a google search, I found that this could be tied to Time Machine.
However, I do not run Time Machine on this computer.

Is there a way to trace the source of the resource hog? Does it log to anywhere? A restart 'fixed' the issue, but I'm sure it will come back if I can't figure out why it began in the first place.

Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

fseventd is the filesystem event logging process, you can read a lot about it in the ars technica review of Mac OS X Leopard. You can use programs like fseventer to see the same kind of output it sees.

From the article:

The FSEvents framework relies on a single, constantly running daemon process called fseventsd that reads from /dev/fsevents and writes the events to log files on disk (stored in a .fseventsd directory at the root of the volume the events are for). That's it. That's the super-high-tech solution: just write the events to a log file. Boring, pragmatic, but quite effective.

You can check that log though I dont know how useful it will be for you. I would not be that surprised to see Time Machine, which deals with many files, and sometimes many many tiny files, to possibly cause some issues with fsevents.