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Mac OS X forum: mkfontscale processes eat up CPU

by: digital_discuss August 27, 2010 1:54 AM PDT

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mkfontscale processes eat up CPU

by digital_discuss - 8/27/10 1:54 AM

I see many mkfontscale processes taking a considerable amount of CPU power on my 10.5.8 mac every 5 to 10 seconds. Anyone happen to know what software could initiate mkfontscale? The processes originate from the root account so they are likely to have come with some installation lately. I don't see any clear culprits though.

I have macports installed, but I'm not actually running any apps from there, nor have I installed or compiled anything. X11 is not installed.
What do have is bunch of third party java development tools, but these processes still keeps running after I quit those tools and I've had most of them for years.

Any ideas what too lok for or how to analyze what app or process starts up the mkfontscale processes?


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From Activity Monitor

by Jimmy Greystone - 8/27/10 6:27 AM

In Reply to: mkfontscale processes eat up CPU by digital_discuss

From Activity Monitor, you can hit the Inspect button on the process and it will show you the parent process. But I suspect that this is going to involve the editing of your crontab file, so hopefully you're fine with digging into the Unix guts of OS X. Sounds like you're not altogether unfamiliar with that sort of thing since you've already made the connection between macports, X11, and mkfontscale.

So, just check your cron jobs and you'll probably find mkfontscale in there.

Sometimes these things can also be the first indicator of a permissions problem. So, probably wouldn't hurt to do a repair permissions op as well.


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Doxygen likely culprit

by digital_discuss - 8/28/10 4:12 AM

In Reply to: From Activity Monitor by Jimmy Greystone

It seems that Doxygen or possibly Graphviz for some reason could have left processes hanging after I ran these weeks ago ( I haven't restarted).

I can't be sure however, but Doxygen do use the fontconfig library, so it seems likely to be the cause of this problem.

I did a restart and the process bash that initiated the mkfontconfig seem to not be doing that anywhere, though I find it strange I couldn't see any running jobs for the shell.

But I'm not that cunning with the built-in shell commands. Shouldn't ``jobs -l'' list all running shell jobs? If so, it's possible I inadvertently left out sudo before that. But they're not running now anyway.


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