Ubuntu – What causes high CPU usage by mount.ntfs

cpucpu loadmountntfsntfs-3g

I'm in Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit. mount.ntfs use high CPU–40%. I have Intel Core i5-3210M. Why is this happening?

lsblk:

NAME   FSTYPE   SIZE MOUNTPOINT        LABEL
sda           465.8G                   
├─sda1 ntfs     300M                   Windows RE tools
├─sda2 vfat     100M /boot/efi         SYSTEM
├─sda3 ntfs     438M                   Windows
├─sda4 ntfs    97.7G                   
├─sda5 ext4    94.1G /                 
├─sda6 ntfs   263.3G /media/user/DATA1 DATA
├─sda7          128M                   
└─sda8 ntfs     9.5G                   Recovery
sr0            1024M

top:

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND     
26199 root      20   0   14712   1940    684 R  45.5  0.0   3:07.80 mount.ntfs  
26268 user      20   0 1255660 385524  49108 S  15.3  4.8   1:01.41 firefox     
28549 root      20   0  483936 130680 109148 S  12.3  1.6  11:06.58 Xorg        
26250 user      20   0  538956  30212  19316 S   6.0  0.4   0:22.58 gnome-syst+ 
29140 user      20   0 1579488 237416  38440 S   5.3  2.9   5:56.58 compiz      
 8311 user      20   0 4833744 253740  25596 S   4.3  3.1   1:26.34 java        
31864 user      20   0  671040  22512  13420 S   1.3  0.3   0:07.73 gnome-term+ 
   10 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.3  0.0   0:13.72 rcuos/2

Best Answer

Changing the mount options for the NTFS partition changed the application I was using from unusable with 100% mount.ntfs CPU to fully functional. The key one to use is "big_writes", but my full list is:

windows_names,norecover,big_writes,streams_interface=windows,inherit

You'd use it like this: 

mount -t ntfs -o windows_names,norecover,big_writes,streams_interface=windows,inherit /dev/disk/by-uuid/DISKUUID /mountpoint

The full list of options and what they mean on the Ubuntu manpage for ntfs-3g: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/eoan/man8/ntfs-3g.8.html

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