Why is my CPU working so hard?

Question

Level 1

8 points

Why is my CPU working so hard?

Recently my CPU has been working very hard causing the fan to spin at high speeds constantly. This even happens if I am only running Safari without any other problems but my CPU still runs at 60% capacity. Is there anyway to check if there are background programs running or find out what is causing this?

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on May 2, 2008 5:27 AM

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Answer 1

GfulDedFan

Level 4

3,315 points

May 2, 2008 5:41 AM in response to acrotar

You could check your Activity Monitor but my guess is that you need more RAM. Insufficient RAM will cause the CPU to work to hard. A MacBook can take a maximum of 2 to 4 GB depending on the model that you have. I suggest installing the maximum that you can afford. -GDF

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Answer 2

Solid

Level 5

4,370 points

May 2, 2008 1:22 PM in response to acrotar

This could be a shortage of RAM, but your problem sounds like a misbehaving app to me. One thing that has caused my Macbook fan to go crazy in the past is a bad widget in dashboard. It hogged 90% of the CPU in the background even though Dashboard wasn't even invoked.

As mentioned, launch Activity Monitor and make sure "all processes" is selected to see if you can identify the misbehaving app. I eventually had to delete that bad widget from Dashboard and never had the problem again.

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Answer 3

y_p_w

Level 6

17,762 points

May 2, 2008 6:10 PM in response to acrotar

Of course check activity monitor. Often for me it's "mdworker" which is a process that has come up when Spotlight is indexing a new drive or reindexing an old drive. I think it's used by other applications, and I had it running for several minutes a few days ago.

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