Continuous 'Service Exited in system log

I changed my mind and decided to not rebuild my system.

1) it take a really long time and I need my computer for other tasks.

2) My Spotlight is returning the correct results now.

The errors still bug me. If you know me, I'm very against alerts and/or notifications that are not actionable. If it doesn't require an action, I don't want to hear about it. The removes noise and allows me to focus on the important things. That's why I always put a log level( DEBUG, INFO, CRITICAL, etc) in my application logs to tell the user if the event is important, a warning, or just informational.

I'm surprised that Apple doesn't do the same. We get to read the messages and decide the importance for ourselves without being familiar with the source code or the design of the application.

e.g. this is what I see now.

Apr 25 09:41:35 redacted com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.04000000-0300-0000-0000-000000000000[59634]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[97]

It sounds critical, but is it? If I was doing the logging and the message wasn't important, I would mark the message's importance

Apr 25 09:41:35 INFO redacted com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.04000000-0300-0000-0000-000000000000[59634]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[97]

"INFO" would tell you that the message is merely informational and does not require any action on the end user's part.

An Apple developer should chime in on this, but they probably won't.

Yea, they are folders on your disk but act like virtual drives (at least GDrive) someone pointed out those services may interrupt Spotlight indexing causing the continuous exit. I you are using only iCloud it shouldn’t be that.

maybe Adobe’s CC software? Or maybe some older version of any sync software?

@steve626 I think the issue is more nuanced than you are describing.

I have a 2015 MBP and when I look in console, in the last 20 minutes, I've had 10 "Service exited due to SIGKILL" messages that stem from mds.

The reason I found this thread is because a client of mine gave me her 27" iMac 2014 to replace the HDD, which is old and failing, a common occurrence in Macs that are 5+ years old. I replaced the disk, as I've done for dozens of clients just this year alone and hundreds over the last 20 years, and then installed a fresh copy of macOS Catalina and then ran Migration Assistant. The system runs super slow. It has 16 GB of RAM, but memory pressure is around 14 GB in use. The CPU load is almost always at 100% or close to it.

Three separate times, I've erased the new 2 TB SSD and started over. Every time, I get the same result. I've tried Catalina and Big Sur. I've tried Migrating everything; I've tried migrating only the user accounts.

Finally, I've started having a look at the console. Whereas I get about 10 per 20 minutes, this iMac is getting 10-20 such messages per minute. It was getting 4-5 per second before I added all volumes to the Privacy section of the Spotlight preference pane.

So, while I agree that these Service exited due to SIGKILL messages are normal, and do not by themselves indicate a problem, getting an average of one every two minutes is significantly different than getting dozens or hundreds per minute.

I'll be trying another fresh install tonight to see at what point the deluge of messages begins.....

Zonker did you get a resolution?

I am watching this thread as I have the same over-abundance of

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.....00[1945]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[96]

normally before a fan frenzy and shut down.

I blamed Big Sur and have tried to stop Spotlight indexing. Ran from a clean Boot SSD of Big Sur.

On Big Sur I tried to mute that flooding message with this workaround:

sudo vi /etc/asl/com.apple.mds 

put your password then insert the following code and save

? [= Sender com.apple.xpc.launchd] [S= Message SIGKILL] claim only
* ignore

then again

sudo killall -HUP syslogd

After that the annoying message disappears.

my two cents

(notice: this will hide every com.apple.xpc.launchd logs containing the word "SIGKILL" )

As I wrote, it's a workaround to stop that useless message flooding in the syslog.

In my case this helps me to read the logs without continuing to scroll-skip that stupid message.

With the following filter it seems isolate better, only to "mds SIGKILL" related logs.

? [= Sender com.apple.xpc.launchd] [S= Message SIGKILL | sent by mds] claim only
* ignore

It will hide them, but what to do to stop this activity? My computer seems to put all his skills to play with himself and this stupid message and ignore the fact that I try just to open some program - Davinci - it does nothing, than quit, and what I see is this message all the times.

Really, well I'm getting about 20 of these messages a second in my log and its chewing up 70% of my system ... which is impacting me ... the only user of this computer, who also owns the computer, so I'm the hardcore sys admin that has to fix this stuff ... How does someone with any kind of "points" on this blog come up with an answer like "nothing in the console intended for the user" ... Really pretty obnoxious ...

Same problem here.

I come home every day to find my machine has rebooted and all my work lost.

System log is full of SIGKILL mds worker errors.

Big Sur is the ONLY MacOS I've used where I get kernel panics (and they happen on a regular basis)

Apple is going seriously downhill. Spoiled with all their money.

fuck you apple. next machine I'm going back to Windows.

I don't need your buggy OS, constantly rebooting, overheating, kernel panicking OS anymore.

Windows is starting to look good again.

M1 stuff is majorly disappointing.

What is most disappointing is the system log is full of huge amounts of noise ... errors that represent sloppy software engineering such as complaints about two versions of this in multiple libraries, complaints about wrong key in some service definition, service killed by mds and all of these are conditions created by Apple itself. Apple introduced the multiple versions, Apple hasn't cleaned up its service definitions in its own configuration files ... and if mds killing a mdworker thread is innocuous, then why write a string in the system.log

Just sloppy software engineering, making ownership of a Mac OS 11 machine somewhat complicated ... I like the idea that the user isn't suppose to look in these files (some Apple person offered that as a reply) ... since Apple doesn't log into any of my machines, who are these messages for ????

@steve626

totally agree with HWtech

Excellent post and advice… particularly amongst a typical collection of colourful, emotional, dumb, delusional, desperate

etc etc type responses which inevitably appear on these threads. Great bedtime reading if you are having trouble getting to sleep & you can’t get to a pharmacy for some decent sleeping medication.

Jokes aside, I’ve been using Mac’s for years and have owned several models over the years but tonight I happen to be unboxing and setting up a brand new iMac Model A2115 shipped with BigSur version 11.1

After working my way through the setup assistant including iCloud login the first thing I did was check System Preferences for an update.

Whilst waiting for the latest Big update to download I went into system report to remind myself of the machine specs etc & for no specific reason checked out the system logs… hence why I found this thread because my machine is spewing out the same repetitive SigKill etc junk that everyone else has encountered.

So just thought I’d throw my two cents worth in that it’s happening on a 100% brand new iMac with zero applications installed other than what it was shipped with.

No idea whether this IS actually an issue that I should be concerned about or not as you’ve subtly suggested but given my machine is out of the box I’ll submit the feedback to Apple so it is documented & on the record if it does turn out to be something potentially detrimental to a piece of tech I’ve parted with a nice wad of cash for…

Same Problem in Catalina MacBook Air 2017 after mi mac Shut Down Could Be the Fan?

ep 30 12:34:35 MacBook-Air- com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.metrickitd[628]): Could not find user/group associated with service: 0: Undefined error: 0 mobile/(null)

Sep 30 12:34:35 MacBook-Air- com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.metrickitd[628]): Service setup event to handle failure and will not launch until it fires.

Sep 30 12:34:35 MacBook-Air- com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.metrickitd[628]): Service exited with abnormal code: 78

Sep 30 12:34:53 MacBook-Air- com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.0C000000-0200-0000-0000-000000000000[620]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[111]

Sep 30 12:34:57 MacBook-Air- com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.0D000000-0300-0000-0000-000000000000[623]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[111]

I'm wondering if anybody at Apple is reading these things, since this is a problem that has been around for several years now. And it's now impossible for me to fix anything using Terminal thanks to all the "security" features they keep adding.

Anything you can tell us, Apple?

I'm wondering if anybody at Apple is reading these things,

No need to wonder at all. Apple is not here looking for things to fix.

Also, the log entries in and of themselves are not a problem. An excessive number of them seems to be related to third-party software interfering with spotlight.