I love Quicksilver. I don’t even use more than a third of its capabilities and I still couldn’t do without it. As nothing more than an application launcher, it’s completely indispensable to me. Because of it, I’m able to autohide my dock and, quite honestly, never see it. I don’t keep a single application icon on it (save those that are running, of course).

For the last few weeks, though, I’ve been noticing that Quicksilver has been absolutely monopolizing my CPU cycles to the tune of 65%-95% according to Activity Monitor. I don’t know when this started and I don’t recall any kind of “precipitating event” in the recent past that even might be the cause. If I only saw this kind of monopolization when it was reindexing, it would make some sense. That’s not the case, though. Usually, Quicksilver’s Task Viewer indicates nothing happening at all. The only thing I know for certain is that the application seems to have gone rogue on me. It’s out of control.

I thought I’d found a solution on Mac OS X Hints, but…no. And, by the way, if anyone else cares to try that hint, note that the Quicksilver caches are located in ~/Library/Quicksilver, not in /Library/Quicksilver as the hint indicates (the comments point this out as well). Deleting the specified directory (and a few others) briefly offered hope only to snuff it out. Cruel.

I don’t appear to be the only one seeing this, but it’s not something I’ve heard much rumbling about nor have I found a working solution. Has anyone else seen this and maybe dug up any kind of explanation, fix or workaround?

Update 7/31/2008: And then, just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. Quicksilver seems to have righted itself and my CPU is happily idling along at ~4%. I don’t know what I did, but it may have something to do with the wall-to-wall counseling I gave it yesterday (7/30/2008).

For the last few weeks, I’ve been using Safari as my default browser because Firefox was regularly sucking up far too many of my system resources. Sometimes it would chew up nearly 30% of my CPU and/or 300+ Mb of memory. Nothing beats Firefox for development purposes, but for day-to-day browsing and so-called productivity tasks…that kind of resource usage just isn’t acceptable. This morning before work, though, I was notified by Firefox that the latest drop – beta 4 – had been downloaded and was ready to install. So I installed.

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