My friend build_hd_index (updated 4x)

Since I’m on a bit of a performance tuning hunt this week, I decided to find out why my hard drive was grinding away this morning.  (With a load average of 2.6)

Turns out, it was my old friend build_hd_index.  This horrible little app is part of Apple Remote Desktop.  It is designed to index the hard drive at a default time of midnight on all systems that are managed by Remote Desktop. Seems innocuous enough- that is until you hear it churning away late at night on several computers.

So now we have Spotlight, locate, Time Machine and build_hd_index indexes of the hard drive and they all grind away at all hours of the day and night.  The unfortunate thing is that only Spotlight is away of the “special” status of Time Machine’s Backups.backupdb database.  All the others just thrash away.

So without further ado- here’s how to disable build_hd_index:

sudo chmod a-x /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/build_hd_index

Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

update: A few people have written me to say that turning off the “generate reports” option in the Sharing/Remote Management panel will keep this from happening but this seems to have no effect on my system.

update 2: A better fix: manually reset the data collection policy by removing the file com.apple.ARDAgent.plist file in /Library/Preferences as Apple recommends.  (This does not seem to always do the trick)

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent.plist

update 3: laptopleon pointed out that nulling the privileges can break macosx server system updates.  I’ve updated the chmod command to simply remove execute privs.

update 4: Apple has posted a Knowledge Base article: “Apple Remote Desktop: How to disable build_hd_index.”  Not sure that this is a definitive solution.