Max tilt fans again!

For some reason every 6 months or so my imac goes crazy with the fanspeed and the main fan just runs at 3600 rpm even when it sitting around doing nothing. As soon as you wake it up from sleep the fan starts going again. I have tried the power off, unplug for 20 seconds and plug back in again. I have also done the Pram reset with holding down the 4 keys and waiting for the second chime. The hd fan sits around 1800 rpm but I have noticed that the hd seems to be being written too rather a lot which makes me wonder whether there is some rogue process that is noodling round with the hd all the time that shouldn't be. But even when quitting everything other than finder there is still activity and the fan is still full speed. The only mysterious thing is called Ink server. No idea what it is!

Why won't the fans slow down?!!!!! The cpu temp is about 71C, The northbridge is reading 77C. I have checked the vents so I know it is isn't dust this time

It seems to go mad after an update more often than not. I have noticed over the last couple of weeks it has not being going to sleep as much and stays awake where I'd expect it to go to sleep. I put it down to having things like tweetdeck running continually and the new facebook which seems to actively query the network more than it used to.

Any bright ideas as the noise is really intrusive???

In reply to a post by teabelly:

Any bright ideas as the noise is really intrusive???

When it's happening, what does Activity Monitor say? Any processes consuming high levels of CPU or disk time?

It is the same regardless of whether there is only finder running with lots of idle time or whether there are loads of processes and the cpu utilization is high. The disk does seem to be being written to even when the machine is idle though which I find odd. Is there a way of deleting the virtual memory file so that it starts again as it is showing as 7GB and it is paging stuff in and out of memory even though there is physical memory free?

The virtual memory file should be cleared on a reboot.

How do you know it's paging? It could be indexing or doing Time Machine stuff?

Edited by deleted (Fri 22-May-09 13:51:22)

It's at 9GB now and is creeping up. Normal memory is getting shorter and it is writing to the disk. The page in and out figure is changing so I know it's paging. I think there is some process that is just sucking up memory that is at the root of it. CPU is 50% idle, load is under 1.

In reply to a post by teabelly:

It's at 9GB now

How do you find the current size of the swapfile?

It tells you in the activity monitor app which is in the utlilities directory.

In reply to a post by teabelly:

It tells you in the activity monitor app which is in the utlilities directory.

That runs from startup on the second monitor

It tells you how much virtual memory is being used by each process, but not the total (unless I've missed something).

Or did you just do a rough mental add-up?

In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by teabelly:

It's at 9GB now

How do you find the current size of the swapfile?

In the Finder "Go" menu select "Go to Folder"
enter:
/var/vm
and you will see your current swap files. A 64MB swap file is always created at start up but it is only used as necessary. Extra swap files are created as required and the size of each new one increases.

It tells you in the 'System Memory' tab in the lower 3rd of the Activity Monitor app.