Periodic Routine Scripts Periodic Routine Scripts
Mac OS X performs background maintenance tasks at certain times if the computer is not in sleep mode. If your computer is shut down or in sleep at the designated times, the maintenance does not occur. In that case, you may want or need to run these manually.
Mac OS X periodically runs background tasks that, in part, remove system files that are no longer needed. This includes purging older information from log files or deleting certain temporary items. These tasks do not run if the computer is shut down or in sleep mode. If the tasks do not run, it is possible that certain log files (such as system.log) may become very large.
These tasks are scheduled for 03:15 to 05:30 in your computer's local time zone.
You may notice brief periods of intense, unexplained hard disk activity as a result of normal operating system maintenance.
Symptom
• You hear a brief period of intense hard disk activity, lasting up to about a minute. There is no alert message to explain the activity. This may occur when no other applications are open or when all other applications are idle.
• If you look in Process Viewer or use the top command, you see that the process "find" is using significant CPU time during this activity.
• Users familiar with Sherlock scheduled indexing may confuse this activity with that feature.