I can throw this with a tag for Joe Kissell, but open to all.
I had the Automator editor open (and had two actions open that turn on/off "cloud" services -- they exist because when I get to work I want to shutdown Amazon Cloud, GoogleDrive, Box, DropBox, etc because they are blocked by our firewalls. And then to start it when I get home. I had Automator open to tweak one where I need to make a change for the Crashplan Service -- not the application).
Anyway, I took my MacBook Pro Retina 15" to a series of meetings at work. After 2 hours or so I was suddenly warned that my battery was dangerously low. I had to run back to my desk and grab my power supply. After giving it "juice", I opened up the Activity Monitor and looked at the Energy tab and saw that Automator had used/was using 96% of the battery. CPU levels didn't seem to be an issue - or I hand't noticed.
I quit Automator and after recharging my Mac I unplugged the Mac and opened the Automator editor again But in my brief
testing I couldn't get Automator to use the battery so badly.
I'm just curious if anyone else has seen that type of power issue with the Automator editor.
My only other thought to try would be to step through on of those actions and just leave it between two steps and see if that was the trigger. I don't recall if I had run one or was stepping through and then went to the meeting and left things in a "limbo" state.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Brian