Kernel Panic, MDS, and Kernel_task ... what to do!?

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Level 1

55 points

Kernel Panic, MDS, and Kernel_task ... what to do!?

Hey there,

Earlier this week I reinstalled snow leopard on my computer in order to allow me to run boot-camp as I there wasn't enough consecutive space on the drive open to make the partition size I wanted (I currently have 36gb free on my 160gb drive) When I re-installed snow leopard I used my time-machine backup to restore all the information. Prior to doing this I had not suffered any issues with kernel panics, but as of recently my system has been excessively "laggy", giving me the beach ball for upwards of a minute with itunes, google chrome, and pages open. When I look in activity monitor MDS and Kernel_task are eating up a ton of virtual memory. I tried doing an smc and pram reset earlier this evening to no-avail. I have repaired permissions as well and am still in the same boat. I feel like the next step is to try another installation but I'm not sure! Any suggestions would be great!

-John

 Book pro 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Dou (2gb ram), Mac OS X (10.6.2),  Ipod 30gb 5th Edition, My Book Home 500gb external

Posted on Feb 1, 2010 2:28 AM

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Answer 1

S.U.

Level 6

9,601 points

Feb 1, 2010 3:49 PM in response to john_powers

Try a Google search of mds osx. There are a number of blogs and sites which address this problem, which seems to have to do with the spotlight indexing.

Good luck!

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Answer 2

john_powers Author

Level 1

55 points

Feb 2, 2010 6:24 PM in response to S.U.

Ok, I searched the internet and found this terminal command: sudo mdutil -avE. I just finished running it and my free memory increased from 10-12mb prior to ~250mb after it finished. MDS is still taking ~158.2 mb ot real memory and ~207.3 mb of virtual memory. Kernel_task is still the next highest process at 122mb or real and 55.6 mb of virtual.

Page ins = 2.56gb
page outs = 13.8mb
swap used = 29.8mb
VM size = 167.04

The programs open are mac mail, iTunes, google chrome, pages, terminal, and activity monitor. Do any of those values look wrong? At least the free memory is back to a reasonable level (wired = 202.7mb, active= 1,0009mb, inactive=585.7)

Message was edited by: john_powers

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Answer 3

S.U.

Level 6

9,601 points

Feb 2, 2010 7:23 PM in response to john_powers

I'm really no expert on this, which is why I directed you to a Google search rather than giving a specific answer myself.

By way of comparison, my mds is taking 73.4 MB of real memory and 170.6 MB of virtual memory. I show a kernel task using 277.1 MB of real memory and 64.3 MB of virtual memory.

VM size: 152.22 GB
Pages ins: 454.9 MB
Page outs: 0 bytes
Swap used: 0 bytes

I have Mail, Safari, iCal, Preview, Disk Utility, Keychain Access, Mactracker, Stickies, Activity Monitor, System preferences, Pages, Numbers, System profiler, and Software Update open.

I have 1.87 GB free memory, 629.6 MB wired, 1.23 Active, and 295.2 MB inactive.

Not really sure what any of this means, but maybe it will be helpful to have something for comparison.

Did you read the X Lab article?

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html

I'm not sure it's been updated for Snow Leopard, but in general the X Lab is a good source of information.

Good luck!

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