Continuous disk-reading while idle

[Iritscen]

So I've been running Watcher throughout the day, with a single watcher entry which is refreshed every 5 minutes, and I noticed my hard drive being very active.  I have iStat Menus installed, and it shows that Watcher sometimes starts reading 52KB/s, continuously, until the app is quit.  Interestingly, I can also get it to stop reading the disk by editing the entry, and hitting Save (Cancel doesn't do it).  Then Watcher runs silently for a while (an hour?) before starting to show the problem again.  However I don't think that Watcher needs to initially run for a long time before the bug can be observed -- at least on my system, it can show up quickly after being started.

[JD]

Interesting.

Run Activity Monitor, select the Yummy FTP Watcher process, click the Info toolbar icon then select the Open Files and Ports tab. This updates automatically as files are opened/closed so keep an eye on it to see what is being opened by Watcher and get an idea of what is going accessed so often. You might need to size the window large to catch it. I'll run a test here to see if I can reproduce anything.

If you could post screenshots of your configuration (via email support at yummysoftware.com unless you don't mind everyone seeing it) then I can create a similar setup.

[JD]

I've been running Watcher all day without seeing this issue. I've even installed iStat Menus to be sure I can see what you do, but I'm not seeing Watcher do anything wrong so far 

[Iritscen]

Wow, I didn't know Activity Monitor could tell me the open files for an app; I guess I haven't done enough exploring there.  I'm not clear on whether this file list updates in real-time, though.  I didn't see it changing over time.  But I have saved it and am emailing you a copy.  I also took a sample with Activity Monitor while Watcher was doing its continuous reading thing.  Not sure if it will help, but it sure shows a ton of calls to file-reading functions.  Also being emailed is a screenshot of what it looks like in iStat when this is occurring.

[JD]

Yep, it's a useful debugging tool. It does auto-update but not very frequently so maybe the small open/read/close isn't being caught. Nevertheless, the traces you send definitely show disk activity in Yummy FTP Watcher, which is helpful, so I will investigate and get back to you