Is MDS taking over your CPU on OS X? Try Spotless.

Jeff Mancuso June 24th

My 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.

spot10.jpg

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.

4 Responses to “Is MDS taking over your CPU on OS X? Try Spotless.”

  1. ST Says:

    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.

  2. Jeff Mancuso Says:

    ST – how about you save everyone some money and tell us what command to enter! :)

  3. Ryan Says:

    Um.. looks like he did.. the command is mdutil.

    go to /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, start a shell, and type mdutil

  4. Jeff Mancuso Says:

    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.

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