User Nobody – Parent SH
August 17th, 2008
This is a closed circuit post to Mac users only…
I noticed on Saturday morning that my Macbook Pro was unusually slow. I ran Activity Monitor to see what was running. A process called “find” was running and the parent was listed as “SH”. That’s pretty close to SSH, the program you use to open a terminal session on a different computer. No one should be SSHed into my computer, so I got a little bit worried.
I googled it and found the answer here. It was only Spotlight updating its index of files. As proof, I opened Console and saw the following under /var/log:
The timestamp was around the time I noticed the slowdown. Mystery solved.
(okay, all my posts can’t be gems.)
Last night I experienced the following. My iMac was idle. The screensaver blackout and then my harddrive started spinning after a few minutes I got worried and started activity monitor. I show the same thing you described above. Because I didn’t know what was going on, I pulled out my network cable. The Find process, parent SH and user Nobody stopped. When I replugged my network cable it didn’t happen again.
Questions:
- would Spotlight use a network connection to update the index?
- if not, why did it stopped after I pulled out the network cable.
With kind regards,
Marlon.