[X4U] Recover from Directory Service database index corruption

[LAL]

Dear all.

Ever since I upgraded my PPV laptop from Tiger to Leopard,  
DirectoryService (process 34) had been a real PITA.
I found this hint and performed it.
I THINK my problems have been resolved.

Just sharing in case...

Lee

Recover from Directory Service database index corruption
Over the course of the last week, I had the following problem twice:  
My MacBook Pro ran with a processor load of 190% — I had a look at the  
Activity Monitor utility and found out that this load came from a  
single process called DirectoryService. Thus the computer became  
unresponsive and unusable — and a simple reboot didn’t help.

I did a little research on the topic and this is what I ended up doing:

	• Open a new Terminal window
	• Go to the following directory: cd /var/db/dslocal/indices/
	• Delete the corrupted database index: sudo rm Default/index
	• Enter your password and confirm with Return
	• Reboot your machine — since we already have an open shell, let’s do  
it geek-style: sudo shutdown -r now
You can also try to kill the DirectoryService process by executing  
sudo killall DirectoryService, but you have to go through the steps  
above to make sure that the database index will be rebuilt and not  
cause the same problem again after you reboot your machine.

This way I solved the problem on my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.5  
Leopard — good luck!

UPDATE: If this doesn’t work for you because your machine is not  
responding due to the high processor load, boot pressing the Shift key  
and try the whole process again in Safe Mode.

http://julianschrader.de/20071224-recover-from-directory-service-database-index-corruption/