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what are hiutil and mdworker? - they're maxing out the CPU!!

So I upgraded this afternoon to Lion on my 13" macbook air from the App Store; first of all the reboot crashed, then a hard off and back on sorted that out.


Now hiutil (and sometimes mdworker) are trashing the CPU constantly at 90-100% (and making the fan go crazy with it)


Anyone have any idea what these threads are?


My MBA is now unusable because of these!!



Cheers, Simmo

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 20, 2011 8:49 AM

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Posted on Jul 20, 2011 8:51 AM

Lion is indexing your HD..that will cause the machine to run hot and fans to blow for a while (20-30) depending on the amount of stuff to index

3 replies

Jul 20, 2011 8:52 AM in response to MrSimmo

mdworker is the Spotlight indexer. Spotlight is a bit wonky in Lion (as it was in SL 10.6.0)…be patient; it might not be fixed until 10.7.2 or so. If you don't use Spotlight, consider turning it off in SysPrefs. It'll cut that process.


hiutil seems to be a low-level process for Help pages. It's probably indexing those (to get the snappy search results from the Help menu).

hiutil(1) Mac OS X Manual Page

what are hiutil and mdworker? - they're maxing out the CPU!!

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