About a week ago I stumbled upon a problem on my MacBook. The ATSServer process was eating my processor capacity and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t stop. It was really strange since I wasn’t doing anything at that moment, and even after rebooting (sorry, still some Windows habits) it started processing again. I started searching on google if other people had the same problem. First I got a search result from someone who had that problem which had something to do with quicktime components, but after removing all components and rebooting multiple times, the problem was still there. The cause for the problem in my case was descibed on someone’s blog (sorry, don’t know which one it was anymore). Apparently ATSServer is (part of) the font server in Mac OS X, and with this person the process started processing when he copied a lot of PDF’s to his harddrive, which sounded very familiar, since I just unarchived 1100+ PDF’s. The conclusion was that it was spotlight indexing the PDF’s. Solution to this problem is to add the folder with PDF’s to the excludes for Spotlight, drawback of this solution is that your PDF’s are not indexed, and thus you cannot find them through spotlight. In my case, the PDF’s where a couple of e-books and since I didn’t care about spotlight for these files, I moved the PDF’s to an external disk which I already excluded from spotlight.
Jan 02
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 am
1100 PDFs shouldn’t take that long, right? Or does Spotlight index inside the PDFs too?
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:16 am
Yes, apparently it scans inside PDF’s so you can also search on the contents.
April 4th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Everytime i copied one single PDF file to my harddrive on my macbook the ATSServer process went crazy. The above did the trick - just sad that it is not possible to index the PDF files without the CPU going crazy,..
//kranko
June 20th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Another tip: goto Spotlight preferences, set the thing to re-index your entire machine, and then run it overnight.
Sometimes the Spotlight indexing mechanism gets borked and doing the re-indexing makes things run *much* better.
See the following for the procedure (pretty simple, although again it is CPU intensive for awhile).
http://www.macworld.com/article/44599/2005/05/reindexspot.html