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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.)

Peter Mortensen
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kubi
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3 Answers3

115

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"
The Tentacle
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30

In the rare case that you would like to disable spotlight, use the following command:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

To re-enable:

sudo mdutil -a -i on
shaond
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3

Just wanted to note that Spotlight/MDS may not be the issue at all. Errors with Time Machine (particularly where Time Machine takes a long time to "index") can create a situation where Spotlight tries to continually index the same files.

duffbeer703
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