High CPU usage on OS X

Troubleshooting
16

Hi Tony,

Yes, I have nothing exposed in odrive and it still runs high on startup. I sent a diagnostic per your request (it just sort of sent, so I hope you can see it). I have attached a screen shot of activity monitor from my startup this morning. The capture is about 3 minutes after startup. It is now about 10 after and it is still hovering at 100%. I expect it will drop to normal in 5 minutes or so.

Thanks,

Jim

17

Thanks. Looking at the diagnostics, it appears odriveapp was occupied with filtering out a massive amount of superfluous filesystem events from Evernote.

OS X notifies odrive of filesystem events so we can understand where odrive-related activity is happening (like someone trying to drag a placeholder file from odrive to somewhere else). We are discussing ways to constrain/limit this to prevent very noisy apps from flooding OS X filesystem events.

You may not still be seeing this, but if you are, can you try closing Evernote and seeing if there is any difference?

Thanks!

18

Hi Tony… wow, Evernote. I’ll check to see what it is doing when I start-up my computer and shut that down. I’ll let you know …

19

Appreciate the follow-up. Will be curious to hear if you see any difference.

20

Hi Tony,

I noticed odrive was using a lot of CPU again on boot. I shut down Evernote in the tray and made sure it was not running elsewhere. It did not seem to have an impact.

Activity Monitor - odrive.png810×44 7.52 KB

Thanks,

Jim

21

Hi Jim,
Did you happen to send another diag when this was happening? I would like to take a look.

Thanks!

22

Hi Tony,

I hadn’t, but just did on startup – it is doing its thing (I again shut down Evernote).

Thanks,

Jim

23

Heh… yeah this time it was massive Firefox cache activity. We really just need to exclude ~/Library/Caches from monitoring. I will see what can be done about this.

24

Hello,

I have the same behavior.

There is a fix to the problem?

Thanks

25

Hi!

I have the same issue - always have - are there any workarounds?

Thanks,
Justin

26

Hi @jhoff33,
Generally elevated CPU is either active syncing, the background scanning process that happens on odrive start-up and periodically afterwards, or excessive file system events from the OS. For scanning, the larger your local odrive structure, the more work odrive needs to do to keep it all in sync.

  • For active syncing, you really just have to wait until it completes.
  • For scanning, unsyncing folders that are not needed can really help to reduce the work needed to keep everything in sync on local and remote
  • For file system events it is generally bursts of activity, so I wouldn’t expect sustained CPU load. If this could be the cause we can test by turning off events and seeing if it makes a difference.

If you send a diagnostic from the odrive menu I can take a deeper look.

27

Hi @Tony,

Thank you for the response! I have just submitted a report. I’m not sure how I can identify it for you - you can find it by my account name? Please let me know what I can do to assist! Indeed this only happens when I first startup odrive. The cpu goes crazy for about 15-20 minutes each time. If this is expected behavior I suppose there’s nothing to be done but I would be interested in your thoughts.

Thank you again!
Justin

28

Hi @jhoff33,
I don’t see anything that raises a red flag in the diagnostic. There is some routine scanning, but your folder structure isn’t very large and the scanning isn’t lasting all that long. There is a fair amount of filesystem activity, and that could be increasing CPU.

The next time you see this happen can you note the time it starts and stops (if possible) and send another diagnostic?
How often would you say this comes up?

29

Hi @Tony,

Thanks again for the prompt response. I have just submitted another Diagnostic.
For your questions:

  • I started odrive at 10:15am Eastern Daylight Time (today, May 12th), CPU activity increased immediately and stopped at about 10:35am EDT (give or a take a minute).
  • This happens every time, without exception, when odrive starts. It’s for this reason I no longer have odrive start on system startup, as it tends to slow down the startup of other services. I start odrive when I need it, which is sometimes daily, sometimes not.

I do tend to reboot my computer frequently for various reasons, so unfortunately this problem hits me a lot.
I love the software, and I am grateful to have been grandfathered in so I get the unsync feature for free, it’s a wonderful feature!

Thanks again for any assistance or advice you can provide!

30

Hi @jhoff33,
I took a look and odrive was doing its extensive initial scanning on startup. There is always a flurry of activity on startup as odrive checks every nook and cranny to make sure everything is as it should be. Generally I don’t expect it to be as long as you are seeing here unless the structure is extensive, but there can be other factors at play that can lengthen the time and impact.

In any case, it isn’t anything I would call “abnormal”. We run hot on startup, unfortunately. There was a post by another user regarding setting the priority of the odrive process. It’s not ideal, but it could help if you find that odrive slows other things down on startup: Decrease CPU priority so ODrive doesn’t interfere with other processes

31

Hi @Tony,

Understood, thank you again for checking it out for me, I do appreciate it.

1 Like
32

Sadly I have this problem too. odrive churns and churns using 53.6 Watts on battery 95.8 degrees F fan blowing. It’s a bummer, I really wanted to love this. Maybe you can tighten the indexing system someday. Dropbox has it down, but they have a big budget…

p.s. This is on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) running 10.12.4 (16E195) and odrive version prod 6296.

33

Hi @matthew.james.briggs,
The next major release we are working on will optimize this a lot, especially for large datasets.

34

That’s good news! What’s the timeline? Does the mac application auto-update? Thanks.

35

Hi @matthew.james.briggs,
This post is the best answer I have for information on the next major release:
https://forum.odrive.com/t/whats-the-status-of-the-major-release/2403/2

It is likely that we will not auto-update the current release to the new one - at least for quite some time - because so much will have changed. Once it is available it will be announced via all of our channels.