Is MDS taking over your CPU on OS X? Try Spotless.
June 24thMy 5 month old MacBook Pro often has the MDS process chewing about 45-50% of CPU at various points in the day. Given that MDS is supposed to sit around and casually index – so that Spotlight can quickly perform a search, this CPU usage pattern is a red flag. Chances are something is wrong with either the disk or the Spotlight metadata index [what MDS manages]. After using Disk Utility to verify the volume, I tried Spotless. It worked great.
Spotless is a nice little $15 nagware utility made by Fixamac Software that helps you delete and recreate the Spotlight metadata folder and index, so that it can let MDS rebuild from scratch. It offers a few other moderately useful features, but if MDS is getting aggressive, this makes it real easy to get a clean rebuild.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
you really shouldn’t pay for something like this. just learn to use mdutil—it’s only one command to turn indexing on off and another to force re-indexing.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
ST – how about you save everyone some money and tell us what command to enter! :)
June 25th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Um.. looks like he did.. the command is mdutil.
go to /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, start a shell, and type mdutil
June 25th, 2009 at 10:25 am
To clarify – I know about mdutil, but some other people arriving at this post might not feel awesome about rooting through a man page or USAGE printout.