Comment 85 for bug 392204

I was almost constantly getting ~95% CPU spikes from the mount.ntfs process, according to 'top'. Disk fragmentation or big files (some files as large as 16GB) were not causing the issue. Defragmentation of the disk, using a Windows workstation, didn't change anything performance wise whatsoever.

What fixed it for me was physically mounting the hard drive to a Windows workstation and using CHKDSK. The disk wasn't damaged or anything but apparently ntfs-3g causes 'free space marked as allocated' in both the Master File Table (MFT) and volume bitmap. Once this is fixed the huge spikes are gone. At least for me.

Hopefully this info can shed some light into the CPU spikes and help some others who are having the same problem.