Prevent high CPU usage on MacOS X Lion

Since upgrading to MacOS X 10.7 Lion and its update to 10.7.1, I’ve have had my fan coming on a lot of times. Something I have hardly every experienced with Snow Leopard. It seams that many are also experiencing this issue as the Apple discussion boards prove.

One of the “solutions” that have worked for me is to disable spotlight (I really don’t need it) with the following command (issued in the terminal):

sudo mdutil -a -i off

Another one was to remove any spotlight plugins that applications like Microsoft Office, Parallels, etc. put into your “/Library/Spotlight” folder. This helped big time.

Last but not least, you can also remove any processes that are being launched during startup which might cause a high CPU usage. In my case, I disable a couple of launchdaemons. The command to do so is:

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/{application}

Say, you want to remove the startup parallels daemon you would do a:

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.parallels.desktop.launchdaemon.plist

Hope this helps anybody out there. After all, there is still hope that Apple finally brings the much needed update that helps fix some issues that came up in MacOS X Lion.