Disk Activity Problem w/ "update" Process

Question

I'm having problems with unusal spikes in disk activity which causes everything I'm doing to pause until the activity is finished. If I'm browsing or switching between folders the app and OS pauses, if I'm watching a video, the video will pause while the audio will continue for a second before stopping.
My CPU, System Memory, and Disk Usage are all in a very low percentile of usage. There's no problem there.
The culprit I've determined is a process called "update" (process ID 89, user: root) At regular intervals "update" will appear on the list of active processes and it is exactly then, everytime, that the system will pause. The process never takes up more than 1% of my CPU.
Does anyone know what this process is and does? If I quit the process, will it stay off? Any information is helpful. I can't find anything about this specific problem anywhere.

Answer 1

I would begin looking at any of your 3rd party software, startupitems, background processes, Safe Boot, as well as cleaning the caches with Applejack.
Many programs and utilities have a "check for updates" feature.
And the more utilities you have running, to "monitor the health of _________" - they all affect system performance. Less is more. They can stumble over each other and even outright conflict.
I would also be concerned with the health of the drive directory and folders and the size of the largest folders (there is still a limit of something like 2048 items per folder which will affect open-save and navigating).
If you have Disk Warrior 4, use it, if you don't, consider it a good investment (just like good backups) for preventative maintenance, not just after there is a problem.