What is fontworker and why does it take up the entire CPU/ System memory/ Disk usage?
The temperature of my MBP soars way high, setting my fan off like crazy
How do I stop this process?
How can I fix this?
I have de-enabled a lot of fonts already.
MacBook Pro,
Mac OS X (10.6),
Classic • Nano iPhone 3G
Same thing has happened to me after upgrading to Snow Leopard. I've been watching the Activity Monitor for quite awhile and noticed that fontworker would start up and take up to 90%+ CPU while the fan goes nuts.
I've gone through this thread and a multitude of other forums and figured out that the issue lies in the Font folder of the Library.
• First I ran in Safe Boot mode and noticed the fontworker did not start in that mode, so this indicates that fonts are not loaded. Whatever fontworker is checking, it's doing so in the font folders. Running in Safe Boot also empties out the font cache, so this made sure I started clean.
• I then restarted in Normal mode, with Activity Monitor on to check CPU process. I made a folder on the Desktop and moved all the contents from User>Library>Fonts into that folder and restarted the system. (One thing to note is that I moved the fonts from the USER font library and not the system font library, since I didn't want to mess with the system fonts)
• After this reboot, I noticed the fontworker doesn't start up. So therein lies the culprit. Something in my Font folder triggers the fontworker and was in conflict, causing it to run over and over again, crashing, then restarting, eating up major CPU. Emptying it from the folder definitely stopped it.
• Using Font Book I started to reinstall the fonts one at a time and noticed that certain fonts would crash my Font Book. I don't know specifically what type of fonts or formats is causing the crash, but I don't doubt this was making the fontworker go nuts. So I deleted those fonts.
One important thing to note is that Disabling the fonts in Font Book alone did not solve the issue initially. Only after moving the fonts out of the User > Library > Fonts did the fontworker stop.
Since being a designer, I've collected tons of fonts and use lots of them for jobs. Some are from questionable sources and some from clients, so there must have been some corrupt files or weird formats in conflict. I also read from a twitter post by other people experiencing this saying that fontworker seems to have an issue with Postscript Type 1 files. Maybe that was it after all?
Fontworker runs when fonts are being activated. It doesn't matter if you're doing that through your font manager (any of them), or manually dropping the fonts into a Fonts folder. Fontworker will be an active process for as long as it takes to complete font activation.
For boot processes, you noticed a huge drop-off in the time Fontworker ran when you emptied the user Fonts folder. This actually makes perfect sense. The way Font Book works (by default), is it dumps every font you've ever activated into the Fonts folder chosen in its preferences. These are "always on" folders, as far as the underlying UNIX system is concerned.
During startup, Font Book has to compare every single font stored in the Fonts folders against its database to see which should be enabled and which shouldn't. That based on the last state they were in when the Mac was turned off or restarted. During this database check, Fontworker has to hang open for the entire time. Only when Font Book is done can Fontworker shut down.
