Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 100% CPU Use
Since upgrading to Lion I've been experiencing a problem where CPU usage will periodically shoot up to 100%, causing temperatures to rise, fans to kick up, and my battery to drain. When I've checked Activity Monitor I've found that the Finder and several applications have spiked in CPU use. Quitting any single application does not solve the problem as the rest will simpy scale up their CPU usage. I have to quit and restart all of them. The list is typically:
Finder
Real Studio
Adobe InDesign CS4
Adobe Extend Toolkit
Adobe Photoshop CS4 (sometimes)
I'm wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar or has any suggestions as to what's going wrong. I suspect it may have something to do with AppleScript, or with the interaction between AppleScript and Adobe's JavaScript engine, as I'm working on a project to automate certain tasks in InDesign. That seems to be the only common denominator, and I don't recall any apps which are not part of this project doing the same. Note that this is happening with the apps basically idle. It doesn't happen after a specific operation, which would make it easy to trace, but maybe an hour after I've stopped working on the project and am doing something else like writing a report.
Thoughts? Suggestions? (I know: quit when you're done. But I've grown used to leaving everything I use open. I could do this with Snow Leopard for a month at a time.)
I might post this as a separate topic, but I really wish Apple would add the ability to limit CPU usage. I wish I could set alerts and caps for the system as a whole and for specific processes. I've had other issues in the past with run away apps, and it's a problem if you happen to walk away for a moment only to come back and find your MacBook at 90C with the battery rapidly draining. Spotlight is one of the worst offenders. Flash on Firefox is another.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 8 GB RAM / 240 GB SSD