If, like me, you are in Poland and you bought a USB key and SIM card from T-Mobile so that your MacBook could have internet access, branded as "Blueconnect", and if you have noticed that when you turn it on the performance of your MacBook goes to shit and the machine gets super hot, here's what's going on and how to fix it:
The blueconnect software is writing hundreds of megabytes of data every hour to log files in two locations:
- /Applications/blueconnect/log/
- /var/log/system.log
The reason it's doing this is because of lines in these two configuration files:
/Applications/blueconnect/config/log/
log4j.properties
log4jAT.properties
If you look at your Activity Monitor, you may have noticed that the mdworker process is constantly active. What's going on is that the blueconnect software is writing hundreds of megabytes of log messages every hour to both files in the /Applications/blueconnect/log/ directory. As it's doing that, mdworker, which is responsible for updating the indexes that spotlight uses to find stuff on your computer, is desperately trying to add all that useless log data to spotlight. All that extra disk activity (writing the logs, reading the logs, and updating the indexes) will run up the cpu on your machine to the point you can't get anything else done except frying eggs on the case.
To fix it, make these changes in these two files:
--- log4j.properties.orig
+++ log4j.properties
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-log4j.rootLogger=error,console,file
+log4j.rootLogger=fatal,file
ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.console=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
RollingFileAppender
--- log4jAT.properties.orig 2011-08-29 12:51:33.000000000 +0200
+++ log4jAT.properties 2011-08-29 12:54:07.000000000 +0200
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-log4j.rootLogger=info,console,file
+log4j.rootLogger=fatal,file
ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.console=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
RollingFileAppender
For good measure, you tell tell spotlight (the spyglass in the top right corner of your screen) to ignore any activity in the blueconnect directory, go to "Spotlight Preferences" and "Privacy" and add /Applications/blueconnect to the "Prevent spotlight from searching these locations" list.