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ReportCrash using CPU due to mdworker crashing

I have seen this reported several times, with different resolutions over the years. I am posting this here as a new discussion to help anyone who has the same problem which seems to be a more recent version of the problem with Mountain Lion, and some older Spotligh plugins.


A noticed recently that ReportCrash process was taking a large amount of CPU. At the time I was away on holidays, and needed a quick solution, so removed execute permissions from ReportCrash, so that my computer would be usable.


Now that I have had time to look at it, it turns out the ReportCrash (the crash reporter) is invoked as mdworker is constantly crashing when being invoked. mdworker is part of Spotlight.


Using Console, anyone can see in the logs it being littered with these crash reports.


To cut a long story short, the problem turned out to be an old Spotlight plugin. Thanks to this CNET article for helping track it down: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20023166-263.html


Have a look in /Library/Spotight


In my case the guilty party was GBSpotlighImporter.mdimporter. I have a 2009 version of iLife (according to timestamps of the plugins), and this is the GarageBand plugin.


Obviously a recent update cause an incompatibility with it.


However it is ridiculous that the OS could let this happen. The launcher should not constantly try to launch a process that is causing problems. It should log it and either give up, and push back on launch intervals. Also the crash reporter shouldn't overburden the machine in this way. Any system should be designed not to compound a system issue with its reporting of it, and throttle reporting of such problems.

MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2008), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Nov 21, 2012 1:20 AM

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ReportCrash using CPU due to mdworker crashing

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