MBP 10.6.8 Cpu spikes

Hi. I have been using my macbookpro now for almost 2 years (2.53GHz i5, 4GB 1067 DDR3, Snow Leopard). The last couple of months I have been experiencing CPU spikes every 10-15 seconds or so. This means that when i play youtube videos or any other videos from firefox (or safari), it will freeze for about 2 seconds, and then start again. As I'm writing this message it also lags every 10-15 seconds or so. (This also happens when I'm not in a web-browser, or when I'm in safemode). I do not have any other hard drives then my macs internal.

When I open Activity monitor I see that when the spikes occur, Kernel_task, Windowserver, SystemUiServer, Loginwindow and some others are the ones that spikes to about 25% usage. Otherwise the Cpu is about 0-3%...

I have verified disk and disk permissions. Repaired it WITH the OS-Disk, but nothing has improved. The weird thing is that sometimes this problem does not not occur (It happens randomly). For instance when i use ProTools 10 (I had PT8 before) and I work with videos, or record guitar, vocal, softsynth +++ I do not have this problem.. The Video window does not lag at all... Even with a bunch of RTAS plug-ins wich do take a bit of ram and cpu, it is not a problem..

Is it possible that some cracked programs could cause this? I feel It's hard to pinpoint the process that is causing these problems, since so many are spiking in activity monitor..

I am not a mac-person when it comes to technical problems and stuff like that. I mainly use my mac for recording music and post production film use (I study to be a sound technician). I appreciate if anyone could help me fix this problem. I apologize for my English writing skills (I'm from Norway )

I would try running a disk clean up and maintenance program first to see if it makes an improvement. The program I recommend is OnyX which is free. Read the instructions and use it in auto mode.

If that doesn't help, post back and we can try something else. Also, your English is very good.

Tried Onyx

Hi. Thank you for replying I downloaded Onyx about a month ago, and when I first started up the program, it said that I needed to repair start disk.. I did so, with the OS install disk, and started onyx again. Executed both maintenance and cleaning.. Rebooted, and nothing was improved.. Verified disk and disk permissions again.. It said nothing was wrong...

About 20 days later i started up onyx again. It said the same thing. Startup disk needs to be repaired.. Did the same procedure again.. Cleaned up with onyx again, and no improvement...

It seems that every 15-30 days or so, the disk permissions and the disk, needs to be repaired. And after I have done this, there is no improvement... Any other suggestions? I think its weird that when these lags occur, the kernel_task, windowserver, loginwindow and some others pop up to 23-25% usage..

Is it possible that the mac is trying to do something every 10-15 seconds, and is not able to execute this task? I really appreciate all help that i can get

When you repaired the disk, did it actually repair and come back clean? You can't repair the startup disk while the machine is running, you have to boot from the restore media and run disk utility from that.

I think so

Well, when I repaired I booted from the CD while holding "c" down, and then I ran disk utility... When I finished repairing it said that everything seems to be fine...

Solution

Hello again. I think I have solved my problem now!! I opened console and found out that qmasterd crashed all the time. I googled around, and it had something to do with final cut pro or dvd stuudio pro (and some other programs). I completely removed both DVD studio pro and Final Cut pro, and now.... The cpu is steady between 0%-1% when im not doing anything special. Finally!

Thanks for the help

Hopefully this issue is gone forever now, but I think that was the root of the problem..