What is 'fontworker' doing?

[Brian Gordon]

Running the latest of everything on a MacBook Pro. System has been real
sluggish all day, and 'top' shows that around half the CPU time is being taken
up by "fontworker". From the man description, I can't see why it would be
running at all, let alone the dominant process.

If I 'kill' it, another instance appears immediately. Rebooting doesn't seem
to help, either. Any suggestions?

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[Jolly Roger]

On 2014-02-25, Brian Gordon <bri...@panix.com> wrote:
> Running the latest of everything on a MacBook Pro. System has been real
> sluggish all day, and 'top' shows that around half the CPU time is being taken
> up by "fontworker". From the man description, I can't see why it would be
> running at all, let alone the dominant process.

Here's the manual page about it:

fontworker(8) BSD System Manager's Manual

NAME
fontworker -- Mac OS X system font registration and validation
daemon

SYNOPSIS
fontworker

DESCRIPTION
fontworker is a system daemon that registers and validates font for
the system.

There are no configuration options to fontworker. Users should not
run fontworker manually.

SEE ALSO
fontd(8)

HISTORY
The fontworker daemon first appeared in MacOS X 10.6.

> If I 'kill' it, another instance appears immediately. Rebooting doesn't seem
> to help, either. Any suggestions?

I would run /Applications/Font Book, select all of your fonts, and
choose File > Validate Fonts from the menu bar to see if there are any
bad fonts installed that may be causing this behavior.

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JR