Macos – Why does MDS run wild in Mac OS X 10.6

cpu usagemacosmdsosx-snow-leopardspotlight

I've been having trouble with the MDS process running wild on my MacBook Pro 13". I've read on other support forums indicating that improperly formatted external drives can be an issue, but I have no drives connected. How can this problem be debugged and fixed?

If it helps, I do have a massive Mail archive. I have not turned off the indexing of this archive, because I haven't been able to find a correlation between the two, but I'm considering it.

(This might be normal right after doing an upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6, in which case the Spotlight search index needs to be rebuilt by mds. But in this case it's been a few weeks.)

Best Answer

To see what mds and more importantly its child mdworker is actually doing - use fs_usage to log what files it is opening:

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker

Though there is a lot of unintelligable stuff in there, it does tell you when it opens a file to begin reading from it. Copying a PDF into my filesystem shows mdworker opening the file then immediately after lots of activity...

p.s. if you want a little less detail, this will just list the open file points:

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker | egrep "open"

Related Solutions

Macos – Why does the Mac OS X 10.6 kernel run in 32-bit mode

In Jon Siracusa's Review of Snow Leopard he discusses the 64-bit transition.

Tiger Leopard Snow Leopard

The short version is: because there's no 'mixed-mode' a 64-bit kernel requires 64-bit Kernel Extensions and Drivers.

As those aren't widely available yet, Apple chose to default to 32-bit to avoid breaking lots of things.

Instructions from the article:

For all K64-capable Macs, boot while holding down "6" and "4" keys simultaneously to select the 64-bit kernel. For a more permanent solution, use the nvram command to add arch=x86_64 to your boot-args string, or edit the file /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist and add arch=x86_64 to the Kernel Flags string:

...
    <key>Kernel</key>
    <string>mach_kernel</string>
    <key>Kernel Flags</key>
    <string>arch=x86_64</string>
...

To switch back to the 32-bit kernel, hold down the "3" and "2" keys during boot, or use one of the techniques above, replacing "x86_64" with "i386".

Macos – Insomniax on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

1.3.4 has been released to address the issues with Snow Leopard and InsomniaX 1.3.3

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22211

Best Answer

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Macos – Why does the Mac OS X 10.6 kernel run in 32-bit mode

Macos – Insomniax on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

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