opendirectoryd taking up 1/4 of the cpu and driving fans crazy on MacBook Air
Here are the results of my investigation: https://superuser.com/a/426719/135263

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As mentioned by @juanpablo, this may be caused by symlinks.

Apparently, if a symlink points to /home, autofs or automountd fire and take a lot of CPU to figure out that the place indeed doesn't exist.

Take a look at /etc/auto_home and /etc/autofs.conf.

To see if you're being hit by this particular problem, set

AUTOMOUNTD_VERBOSE=TRUE


option in autofs.conf, restart automountd

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.automountd


and review the syslog.log (you may use application: Console). You're affected by this problem if you see something like that:

May 20 17:53:43 xxx automountd[31709]: od_search failed


To workaround, edit the file /etc/auto_master and remove (or hash out #) the line starting with /home. Then run:

sudo automount -vc