Intermittent But Frequent Pauses May Be From iCloud Syncing
Topher Kessler (via Pierre Igot):
When using your Mac running OS X Yosemite, you may find that at certain times during the day your Mac will begin to pause, showing the spinning color wheel repeatedly and quite frequently. When this happens, it interrupts all ability to type and interact with other applications, leaving you with the only options of waiting or attempting to restart your system to clear the problem.
[…]
While there is no mention of it in the system console, the problem at hand does coincide with Apple’s handling of its documents in iCloud. This is apparent through the use of the tool “fseventer” which monitors what files on your hard drive are being accessed. Through this tool you can see the massive repeated creation and deletion of a temporary file called “etilqs_NUMBER” that correlates to the pauses, along with a large level of activity for CloudKit and other iCloud resources. The etilqs file is created by the “nsurlstoraged” background process, which is responsible for managing web storage.
