[Ti] unusual activity

[Kynan Shook]

Bert Mehling <bertm at ywave.com>
> I was working with iDisk copying some correspondence for backup and
> noticed the fan was running very fast and the Book was getting quite
> hot. Checked the Activity Monitor and saw there was something called
> "null" using 90% of the CPU. I forced quit it and things calmed down
> right away. Can anyone enlighten me as to what "null" is and how  
> did it
> come to be using almost all the capacity of the CPU? Since having that
> experience, all things have been normal with no signs of a repeat
> situation and I have never seen this before.

Probably just a bug somewhere; I'm betting it said null because it  
couldn't retrieve the name of some process; and rather than print out  
nothing for the name, it shows just "null".

If it happens again, open Activity Monitor and see if you can figure  
out where it came from; looking in order of Process IDs can give you  
an idea of how long it has been running.  Double clicking on it will  
tell you what application launched it; if it's Finder, then you  
might've started it, if it's launchd, Dock, WindowServer, etc., then  
the computer started it, otherwise it could be some other application  
using it for support.  Also check out what user it's running as.  And  
finally, look at the "Open Files and Ports" tab in the process  
inspector; the second item in the list is usually the executable  
file.  You can also see what other files it's using; some could be  
internet connections, some you won't be able to make much sense of,  
and many will be frameworks in the OS, but a few might be the files  
it's working with too.

Anyway, with all this information, you might be able to figure out  
what it is, and what it's doing; it could very easily be something  
associated with the iDisk connection.