The performance of a MacBook Pro laptop running OS X 10.8.5, aka "Mountain Lion", that I've been using was very poor today and the fan was making much more noise than usual. When I used
top -o cpu and the
Activity Monitor to check which process was causing the problem,
I found that the Symantec SymDaemon process was the culprit. After I killed
that process, performance improved considerably, the fan noise subsided and
when I compared the CPU temperature before and after stopping the process
with osx-cpu-temp, I found the CPU was
considerably cooler afterwards. Likewise, when I checked the fan speed
with smcFanControl before and
aftwards, I found that smcFanControl showed the fans to be running
considerably slower after the process was stopped.
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