Does anybody know what fseventsd does? It is started by root through "launchd (1)" and now and then uses all my CPU and up to 500 MB of memory? Can be killed through Activity Monitor using Admin password.
So, go into Disk Utility and verify your drives, especially the one you use for Time Machine.
I had my drive hooked up to and Airport Extreme Base Station and Time Machine saving to that. At night, I'd go to the Apple menu and put my computer to sleep. I'd notice a backup was occurring and worry a bit but figure Apple would have thought of that. But it did seem to sleep awfully fast considering it should have been stopping the network backup first.
When I would wake the computer the next day, I'd get the message saying the backup had failed. This happened a couple of days in a row before I noticed that fseventsd was going crazy.
I found a web page saying fseventsd doesn't deal with corrupted disks well, so I detached the drive from the AEBS and hooked it directly to the computer. Sure enough the drive had some errors. The sparse bundle that networked Time Machine creates was so bad it was unverifiable and unfixable. Something about a link being bad somewhere. I bet when I put the computer to sleep it just stopped the backup abruptly.
So I had to start all over. And I lost all my backup history. Luckily for me, that's not a huge deal, but it could have been (or could be, if I figure out I'm missing something.)
Moral of the story, don't put your computer to sleep if Time Machine is currently running. I don't know if this is a problem with directly attached drives as well, but I wouldn't risk it.
So, go into Disk Utility and verify your drives, especially the one you use for Time Machine.
I had my drive hooked up to and Airport Extreme Base Station and Time Machine saving to that. At night, I'd go to the Apple menu and put my computer to sleep. I'd notice a backup was occurring and worry a bit but figure Apple would have thought of that. But it did seem to sleep awfully fast considering it should have been stopping the network backup first.
When I would wake the computer the next day, I'd get the message saying the backup had failed. This happened a couple of days in a row before I noticed that fseventsd was going crazy.
I found a web page saying fseventsd doesn't deal with corrupted disks well, so I detached the drive from the AEBS and hooked it directly to the computer. Sure enough the drive had some errors. The sparse bundle that networked Time Machine creates was so bad it was unverifiable and unfixable. Something about a link being bad somewhere. I bet when I put the computer to sleep it just stopped the backup abruptly.
So I had to start all over. And I lost all my backup history. Luckily for me, that's not a huge deal, but it could have been (or could be, if I figure out I'm missing something.)
Moral of the story, don't put your computer to sleep if Time Machine is currently running. I don't know if this is a problem with directly attached drives as well, but I wouldn't risk it.
Here is a very good article on what fseventsd does. Since it writes file system event log files and since applications such as Time Machine use it, I would not stop its process.
Hi,
i've got almost the same problem with fseventsd: the process takes about 99% CPU but just 1.5MB memory. It starts working when TimeMachine (working on a NAS) starts, TM is preparing and nothing changes up to 10 houres.
After stopping TM fseventsd process (mostly) calms down.
I didn't find any errors refering to fseventsd or TM in the log.
Sometimes the system freezes for 20 minutes.
When I stop fsevents process it reappears suddenly.
Does anyone know something about this? What can I do to make the TM run again? The article didn't help me much.
I have the same thing. fseventsd is taking up 100% (but not 200%, or both cpus) but is slowing down the whole machine. 1.09MB real memory, 591.78MB virtual memory. When I try to logout or shutdown, the machine hangs. When I just turn off the power to restart, it seems to start up again if I do anything with time machine. But then turning off time machine doesn't help.
I'm kinda worried because I'm not sure how I'm going to stop this.
Oh, I should note that I've had a lot of "time machine backup failed" notifications when I log in lately. It seems that if I log out while time machine is backing up, my Mac really doesn't like it.
