Very Strange File Count After ML - self healing
 

After installing ML in July I noticed that disk files as reported by Disk Utility went from a few hundred thousand to over 900k which surprised me. Also the Smart Backup time using SuperDuper went from about 5 minutes to 18 minutes.

To address the large increase in the number of files I used a program to purge all the non English localizations which reduced the 900k to about 700k. Then out of curiosity I started monitoring the disk file count every day. To my total surprise the file count went from about 700k to about 270k (See Graph).

http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/9889/diskfiles.png

I haven't done anything that would significantly impact this. Also my total disk has remained constant Used: 30.4G, Capacity: 640G . My Smart Backup time is back to about 5 minutes.

Any thought on what is going on here?

Probably the local snapshot...

I don't use time machine and it is disabled. Also, I thought snapshots were not used on desktops. I'm on a Mac Pro.

I don't know, then. It's not us! :)

I know it's not YOU :)

I have posted this on the Mac forums but don't really expect an answer. Most of the folks that hang out there know less than I do; and, they are somewhat rude and opinionated compared to other forums. [I moderate the mozillazine forums with a few other folks]

I though I'd throw out the question here since you seem to know everything Mac ;)

Yeah, the thing I would have thought was the local snapshot. I mean, there are other things that'll take up space, but not this kind of thing with lots of files. Kind of weird.

Very weird since the approximate 400k files that have vanished didn't, based on Disk Utility and SD, take up any space.

My machine is running fine and SD now does a Smart Backup in about 5 minutes. I still would like to understand this but likely will never figure it out. :confused:

This is no longer self healing. This plot is the latest and this is driving me nuts. Computer works just fine other than a clone with SD takes 18 minutes when the file count is up versus 5 minutes when the file count is down. :confused:

http://imageshack.us/a/img11/8166/mysterye.png

Note over a year of weekly cloning on Lion the file count stayed at about 300K and the clone time about 5 minutes.

I'm sorry - I just don't have any suggestions for you here. It sounds like it's relatively normal OS X operation on your system (or some other software doing what it's supposed to be doing)...we can't really change the number of files on your system.

I know you can't; just an update.

It has to be the OS since I have not installed any new software. I think I'll have to start monitoring my wife's MacBook Pro file count to see if it behaves the same.

Cheers

UPDATE:

Using the Terminal and starting at the root using

cd /

I was able to get file counts for all major directories using

sudo find "<directory_name>/" | wc -l from the Terminal. The results are:

Users: 28200
Applications: 89953
Library: 88184
System: 88072
bin: 38
usr: 21662
private: 319322

That adds up to over 600K files. I'm going to repeat this over the next week and see where the big change is.

One step closer. The bulk of the files in private are in private/var/log

Football time will chase this down Monday.

I now have it down to my AV application, Virus Barrier X6. I have tens of thousands of log files with a first line something like this

mdworker(9642) deny mach-lookup com.intego.mig_hook

Not sure what that means but the number of such files is equal to the difference between my "normal" count and the abnormal high count. I do know that mdworker is the index process for Spotlight.

I have filed a report with Intego.

EDIT: Just heard from Intego with a preference change.

My general opinion: there is no reason at all to run antivirus at present. It's a waste of CPU, I/O and money.