MacBook – Teaching mdworker some manners

macbook prospotlightssd

Ever since my SSD upgrade, I'm having troubles with my MBP Mid-2010 shutting down "randomly". To be more precise, it seems to be caused by mds/mdworker utilizing 100% of my CPU. As a fix I have disabled Spotlight indexing on my whole disk now, and the computer has been stable since then. However, I'd really prefer to still be able to search my disk if that's possible at all.

So, is there any way to each Spotlight/mdworker not to utilize all of my CPU capacity?

Best Answer

You could throttle the specific program using AppPolice:

https://github.com/fuyu/AppPolice

However, this is usually the wrong way to go about it.

If programs using 100% CPU makes your computer shutdown, you have a hardware issue. It would be better to fix the hardware issue.

Usually a problem like the one you described means that the fans in your computer have stopped working to spec. They probably need to be cleaned or replaced.

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Why does mdworker keep spamming the logs on Lion

The messages are coming from Spotlight search.

The message themselves are in relation to iPhoto's data on your images. The tags can be found in the AlbumData.xml written out by iPhoto for sharing use (such as Spotlight and other media sharing tools)

Without more information about the version of iPhoto in use, or whether you have any issues with iPhoto itself (and Spotlight's integration) there's not more more I can tell you.

MacOS – Why does mdworker segfault when scanning files owned by root

The problem was caused by a corrupt Launch Services cache, and I solved it by executing the following command:

sudo find /System/Library/Frameworks -type f -name lsregister -exec {} -kill -seed -r \;

The clue was that the segfault was occurring at CSStoreGetUnit + 84 in both processes; a quick Google search leads to a blog entry which suggested cache corruption might be the issue. Rather than manually rming the cache files, I followed the instructions I found at The X Lab, which amounted to a detailed explanation of how to open terminal to run the aforementioned command, noting:

There is a smartquotes-related typo on that page (reported).
Since mdworker ran fine as UID 501 (and several others), I guessed I'd have to reset root's launch services cache; prefixing sudo had the desired effect.

Additional notes:

On 10.8.6 (at least) you can see all Launch Service cache files with the following command:

sudo find /var/folders /Library/Caches/ -name '*LaunchServices*' -print0 |sudo xargs -0 ls -l

For some unknown reason, a recently-modified cache file for UID 501 exists in both /Library/Caches/ and /var/folders/; other UIDs have only one under /var/folders/. This does not seem to cause any problems.
This did solve the problem with backupd.

Best Answer

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