Snow Leopard / mds high CPU usage: Backblaze

I finally upgraded to Snow Leopard the other day and ever since the mds process has been using 100% CPU most of the time. There are lots of suggestions on the web for curing this by turning off Spotlight indexing, removing your index, then letting it reindex the drive. I tried twice, and it didn't help. Finally I ran across this post:
http://superuser.com/questions/46195/why-does-mds-run-wild-in-mac-os-x-10-6
which suggested running

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mds

It scrolls madly, but I noticed some Backblaze files. Apparently Backblaze was updating its database continuously, which mds was dutifully indexing… continuously and CPU intensively.

I noticed that Backblaze was not up to date, and I upgraded it. Then I went to my Spotlight preferences to put an exclusion in for /Library/Backblaze. There was already one there. My assumption is that the Backblaze installer put that there, and that it somehow got removed by the Snow Leopard upgrade, and reinstalling put it back.

But anyway, hope that helps someone else out there.

Science and Religion

So I've got nothing to say for myself, but here's an interesting post from Sean Carroll.

First post!

I have no real idea what I plan to do with this blog. I’ve never been all that public a person. I don’t even have a web site. Well, I made one, back when Netscape was still a rumor, but in those days you wrote your CGI scripts by hand, in C, uphill both ways. Not a very future-proof way of doing things–didn’t take long for that site to break forever, and I never bothered to make another.

So it may be that, like many blogs, this will be the only post ever. But sometimes I do find myself with something to say to the world, and nowhere to say it. So the next time that feeling occurs, perhaps I’ll actually remember this “place.”