MDS and mdworker processes gone wild

Thank you, thank you Linda,

The Backblaze solution worked!!!! I have two identical 2011 MacBook Pro's and a 2011 iMac.

The one MacBook Pro, not using backblaze has been running cool. For months the MacBook Pro backing up to backblaze could burn your hand with the air blowing out the back. With the fan blowing 90% of the time, my battery life was down to about 2 hrs. iMac running cooler also.

I Still think apple needs to revise the Spotlight feature and exclude folders such as junk mail etc.

I had to completely turn MDS off since I have no time to debug their mistakes.

I ran this:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

to disable spotlight.

you can then re-enable it using:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

after they hopefully fix the performance issues.

Backblaze spotlight did the trick immediately for me. Was having problems with sluggish performance on a very fast iMac. I put the backblaze folder in the spotlight privacy and immediately stopped gettting the mds and mdworker CPU usage. Nice...

I'm probably being a bit thick but where is the Backblaze folder? I've done a Spotlight search and it only finds the Application?? and the MDS is driving me mad!

You'll have to get to your main HD area. In finder, should be at the bottom of the list under "devices" and click on it. Then you can select your HD>Library>Backblaze...

got it! thanks.

2 solutions

• SPOTLIGHT shut down for re-indexing by the command "sudo mdutil-a-i on" does not change the problem.
• Change Priority SPOTLIGHT : Set Spotlight indexer (mds, mdworker) to a lower processor priority:
  • sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds LowPriorityIO -bool true
  • sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds Nice -int 20

Apple needs to give lots of attention to Spotlight in its ML maintenance updates.

This is not an OPTION but a priority in the future update 10.8.x

It makes you almost want to change OS and switch to the competitor

Steve ? What you doing now ??

Thank! It was BackBlaze. The solution was instant.

Lovely 🙂

Made the switch to Crash Plan just over a year ago. Tried Mozy in the past too. Horrible. Tech support of no help.

Works perfect. No failed syncs which I had with both Mozy and BlackBlaze. No MDS problems either.

Resetting SMC seems to have worked for me (on chat with Apple rep). This is what she had me do (for my iMac):

For resetting the SMC, what we want to do is have the iMac powered off first.

Then we want to:

1. Unplug the Power Adapter from the back of the Mac

2. Keep the power cord unplugged for 10-15 seconds, then attach it back into the Mac

3. Press the power button to turn on the computer.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

mds and mdworker seem to be behaving fine now.

HTH

Ajay

http://www.tapinferno.com

You can see what Spotlight's doing by taking a peek at what files its indexing process, mdworker, is reading with this terminal command from an admin user accout:

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker

If the output is going too fast, you can pipe it to less and page through it with spacebar (press "u" to go up a page):

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker | less

Or output it to a file for later reference:

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker > ~/Documents/mdworker.txt

Just hit ctrl-c after it's been running for several seconds to get a good sample dumped to the file.

In all likelyhood you'll see a pattern of the same files being indexed over and over. A common one is the Google Chrome "Extensions" folder. Once you've found the culprit(s), you can do more investigation or just exclude them or a folder 1 level up from indexing in the Privacy tab of the Spotlight PrefPane. To make things easier, you can press cmd-shift-g after clicking the + there, and then paste a path from your terminal output. The changes should take effect immediately, however if you need to reload spotlight:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.metadata.mds && sudo launchctl start com.apple.metadata.mds

Sound method. If I want something from the backup history, I'll go and get it.

I don't want it handed on a plate to me. I wish the backups were differential. If I add 1 contact to Address Book, I don't want an entire copy of the 300Gb startup disk added to the backup disk since the last 6 month backup