Spotlight using huge amount of processor

Software
1

Hi

I have a problem with spotlight indexing. The mds_core process takes often 600% of processor power, once even 1100%… I investigated this, and found that the system log is littered with these entries

Mar 18 09:09:07 Dumbledore com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.04000000-0200-0000-0000-000000000000[3184]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[154]

I assume, that an indexing helper crashes while trying to index one file type. Again and again.

Is there a way of finding out what mds_store is trying to index?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Rainer

2

OK - I have found logs - Observing what Spotlight's mdworker is indexing for diagnostic purposes - Ask Different

Which says to use sudo fs_usage mdworker mds which I am trying at the moment.

Will give feedback.

3

It’s a known issue. Known to the user community that is. But - so far - neglected by Apple. Same thing here. And no clue what’s causing this. Excluding folders from Spotlight didn’t help. Unless I excluded everything of course. :wink:

Pet peeve here, but it seems Apple is more concerned about form than function lately. Lately being the last couple of years. It’s not that macOS is unstable, but there are quite a few things that don’t look healthy. Having hundreds (thousands?) of mds message in the log is something I can definitely live without.

4

OK - so they are “just error messages” and not related to the problem. Thanks.

So any news on the actual problem?

5

Does rebuilding the spotlight index help? In years past, when spotlight got flaky I would run

mdutil -E /

from the terminal which normally fixed the problem.

https://ss64.com/osx/mdutil.html

6

At the moment, it looks like it. I deleted the index using CleanMyMac , put my home directory into the privacy tab to skip indexing and put it back. At the moment, it logos better - I will see,

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