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One of the fun things about having time is the ability to optimize things that otherwise would never get optimized.

I think today’s mission will be figuring out why the hell iTunes always consumes 100% of one of my 2GHz G5 CPUs.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

rds

update @ 1:15PM

After a few Googles, the first stop on our journey is downloading and installing CHUD Tools from the Apple Developer site. As a fan of CHUDs, I’m excited already.

The reason for downloading CHUD Tools is to gain access to amber and acid, two tools that trace and analyze thread execution within processes… which is something I apparently can’t do in the core Mac OS X (ex. there doesn’t appear to be a native version of the Solaris pstack command).

update @ 1:21PM

CHUDs are installed. I’ve completely forgotten about Amber/Acid because I’ve discovered Thread Viewer[1], a GUI for… viewing threads… so I can analyze iTunes. Let’s see… I wonder which of these threads is consuming the CPU… perhaps the big green one:

Hmm… “DoAmazonLookup”. I’m betting dollars to donuts that has to do with the Now Playing iTunes module I’m running to update album art on this blog, especially since it’s been hanging a lot in the current version. Quit iTunes, reboot iTunes, we’re back to normal momentarily - iTunes consuming 4% of one CPU. We’ll keep an eye on it and I’ll notify the developer of Now Playing.

[1] Maybe a front-end for Amber/Acid? D/dc[2].
[2] Dunno, don’t care.

rds