Does anyone know how to delete the mds process? There isn't much I would complain about in OSX, but this problem is bad. Hesitating, overheating and noisy fans are what my MacBook does, and in every case the mds process is hogging the processor. This has to be happening to someone else.
Note that if mds, which is the Spotlight indexing and search process, is hogging your processor beyond a short period when changes are made to your system (installing apps, copying files, etc) or a longer time when you first install a new OS, then something's amiss with your system. Normally mds will be idle for the majority of the time (mine is sitting here with 0% processor usage unless I do a Spotlight search).
So rather than stopping the process completely, you might instead want to try and identify why it's running amok, if indeed it is, and cure it. With more details about your system, someone here may be able to offer more specific solutions, but the normal troubleshooting procedures - disk verification, looking for other rogue processes that might be triggering mds, etc. - would be a place to start.
Activity Monitor says that process mds has 2.65GB of virtual memory, is that normal?
I do use Spotlight and it seems to work well enough. Come to think of it, I had an incident a few months ago where Spotlight would return zero results. I got it working somehow, but is it possible some .plist file is corrupted? Maybe there is a way delete all Spotlight config files and start fresh.
After running repairs on all drives I think things were eventually narrowed down to an external firewire drive that had some kind of corrupt data structure.
Spotless is also popular, great for those who use scratch disks and need to have fine grain control.
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.
I think this is an OSX bug. Yesterday I had an application crash during a Finder action and I sent a debug report to the programmer. He replied saying it was a crash deep in the File Manager.
This may be a sign of impending hard disk failure, this computer is getting to be 3 years old and has seen abusage.
Meanwhile, I did flush Spotlight and re-index, so far it is behaving normally. Thanks for all the input, I'm sure Apple will get this fixed.
I have same problem with mds process. Spinning beach ball anytime I launch an app. Problem seens to have started after I installed Norton Antivirus. Here is my system info:
Mac OS X 10.5.8 (9L31a)
Model Name: MacBook
Model Identifier: MacBook4,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MB41.00C1.B00
SMC Version (system): 1.31f0
Serial Number (system): W882109Q0P2
Hardware UUID: F7C071E3-B4B9-50AB-8B7C-2B94DE6A204F
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled
Sitting here now mds process using 135MB of Real Memory & 840MB of Virtual Memory.
