hwpienaar wrote:
Hi Tim.
Thank you for the advice. I did follow the list as refered to in resetting spotlight indexes. I left my computer on the whole night for the process to complete. Hopefully it did. There was nothing the next morning telling me the process is complete.
The problem still exist.
If 'mdimport' is either not running or is consuming very little CPU then it has finished rebuilding the index. mdimport will still run from time to time to index any new files added to the computer and/or old files that have been updated.
If you check the 'mds' process, is it now consuming less real memory (e.g. a few hundred MB is normal. More than 1 GB would be abnormal.)
A funny thing is that my computer show that the root user is disable, but the programs of the root user is still running as seen on the activity monitor, it is the processes of the root user that uses all my RAM and keeping my computer slow. It is so slow I cannot work on it. I am trying to resolve this problem know for a long time and no one where able to help me, until know. I feel hopeless!
In a Unix operating system, every process must be associated with a user ID. The operating system itself is not exempt from this rule. All processes which are started by the operating system will typically run as either 'root' or one of a number of other special accounts. There are actually quite a few of these special accounts, though you will typically only see processes running under a few of them. It is not possible for a user to actually log into the Mac using one of these special accounts (they have "locked" passwords - which basically means no password would be accepted to log in via one of these special accounts. The Mac simply will not allow a user to log in. When the accounts are needed, the operating system will kick off processes & jobs running under the appropriate special user accounts.
The fact that there are lots of processes running as root is not a problem and is not the cause of your memory shortage. Everyone who runs OS X has these processes running on their machine and aren't having memory shortages as a result.
The issue in your case is that one of these processes seems to be single-handedly gobbling up lots of your RAM, and we haven't been able to determine why.
I tried to download 10.6.2 but it does not download properly. I have tried this download many times. Might this be the reason for my problem, the fact that I am running 10.6.0 and not 10.6.2? Or are there other solutions.
I am far from any city and are not able to take my Macbook to any store for assistance.
I am concerned that not only are you having issues with the 'mds' process, but also unable to update your OS.
Go into "System Preferences" -> "Accounts" and verify that where you see your own user account listed you see the word "Admin" printed just below your name (in the list of accounts on the left side of the panel.) If not, let us know.
Next (assuming you are an 'Admin'), start "Disk Utility" and ask it to "Repair Permissions" on your Macintosh HD. You should also ask it to "Verify Disk". You will get some errors on "Repair Permissions" (Apple has a list of known errors that it will generate, but it will repair any problems not on Apple's list of known issues), but "Verify Disk" should come back with no errors. If "Verify Disk" has issues, please let us know and we'll explain how to do a "Repair Disk" (you can't perform the 'repair' on the same disk you booted from).
After doing this, restart your Mac, log in, run Software Update and see if you are able to apply the updates.
If Spotlight indexed your disk while some corruption existed on it (this what the Repair Permissions is meant to correct) then we may need to rebuild it yet again.
There is a more brute-force way to fix the problem involving the "Archive Install" (a way of re-installing
only the operating system files on your computer without affecting any user accounts or applications you've installed... though you will lose
some settings (e.g. you'll probably have to re-define your printers.)) but you wont lose any of your data or applications. I'd prefer to see if we can't fix your problem without needing to resort to this.