What causes high CPU usage by mount.ntfs?

Question

I'm in Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit. mount.ntfs use high CPU--40%. I have Intel Core i5-3210M. Why is this happening?

lsblk:

NAME   FSTYPE   SIZE MOUNTPOINT        LABEL
sda           465.8G                   
├─sda1 ntfs     300M                   Windows RE tools
├─sda2 vfat     100M /boot/efi         SYSTEM
├─sda3 ntfs     438M                   Windows
├─sda4 ntfs    97.7G                   
├─sda5 ext4    94.1G /                 
├─sda6 ntfs   263.3G /media/user/DATA1 DATA
├─sda7          128M                   
└─sda8 ntfs     9.5G                   Recovery
sr0            1024M

top:

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND     
26199 root      20   0   14712   1940    684 R  45.5  0.0   3:07.80 mount.ntfs  
26268 user      20   0 1255660 385524  49108 S  15.3  4.8   1:01.41 firefox     
28549 root      20   0  483936 130680 109148 S  12.3  1.6  11:06.58 Xorg        
26250 user      20   0  538956  30212  19316 S   6.0  0.4   0:22.58 gnome-syst+ 
29140 user      20   0 1579488 237416  38440 S   5.3  2.9   5:56.58 compiz      
 8311 user      20   0 4833744 253740  25596 S   4.3  3.1   1:26.34 java        
31864 user      20   0  671040  22512  13420 S   1.3  0.3   0:07.73 gnome-term+ 
   10 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.3  0.0   0:13.72 rcuos/2

Solution 1

Changing the mount options for the NTFS partition changed the application I was using from unusable with 100% mount.ntfs CPU to fully functional. The key one to use is "big_writes", but my full list is:

windows_names,norecover,big_writes,streams_interface=windows,inherit

You'd use it like this:

mount -t ntfs -o windows_names,norecover,big_writes,streams_interface=windows,inherit /dev/disk/by-uuid/DISKUUID /mountpoint

The full list of options and what they mean on the Ubuntu manpage for ntfs-3g: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/eoan/man8/ntfs-3g.8.html

Solution 2

You must add line to /etc/fstab for automounting the ntfs partition

/dev/sda6   /media/user/DATA1   ntfs    defaults,nls=utf-8,umask=007,gid=46   0   0

See more details about automount ntfs in:
How to automount NTFS partitions?

Solution 3

I'm using a raspberry pi 4b 2gb. Do you have file compression enabled on the ntfs partition? Last time I accidentally leave it enabled and it killed 3 times the performance in linux. It took me 2 full days to figure it out. not sure if it works for you.

Solution 4

In my case, I have Steam and my games installed on an NTFS partition. For some reason, Steam caused a lot of CPU usage on mount.ntfs (and also partly on its own). It was also unresponsive.

After killing Steam, CPU usage of mount.ntfs dropped.

Note that I already have my NTFS partition configured as indicated in the other answers:

defaults,noatime,big_writes,umask=007,uid=1000,gid=46

View more solutions

Comments

[Farimah]

Enter 'sudo lsof <path_to_NTFS_mount>' in terminal to find out which app uses ntfs.mount

[Oleksandr]

reinstalling the OS - it's better answer ? Now I fix it CPU load problem on own laptop - just add line to /etc/fstab for automount ntfs partition

[Oleksandr]

that's better ?

[Videonauth]

Yes better now.

[aliarousyoucef]

@Oleksandr it was in 2014 lol I remember that I googled without solution reinstalling the OS was my only solution

[Steven Linn]

And how in the hell exactly is automounting going to reduce the CPU utilization of mount.nfs? Explain please. I don't see how this is the top answer.

[Oleksandr]

I think it's just bug in mount.ntfs

[Admin]

An additional remark regarding compression: if the NTFS volume has large compressed files, then opening them for writing uses a lot of CPU, even if nothing is ever written. This is particularly problematic for database files like SQLite.