mdimportserver?

It is a component of Spotlight.

Hi, Sean.

The process mdimportserver is, as Kappy states, a component of Spotlight. It calls mdimporter applications, aka Spotlight plug-ins to extract metadata from documents, colloquially known as indexing.

The messages indicate a problem was encountered by some Spotlight plug-in when indexing a document. Unfortunately, the message does not indicate which Spotlight plug-in was involved, or what documents was being indexed. The message may be the result of the following:

• A document may be considered to match the type of file for a specific Spotlight plug-in, but in fact is either in an incorrect format or may be corrupted.

• If you recently installed a third-party Spotlight plug-in it may be unable to handle some of the data in the documents for which it was designed, i.e. it's buggy.

These may be informational or warning messages, hence you may be able to ignore them, though you may get unexpected results from Spotlight searches intended to retrieve the files being indexed. You may also want to check console.log to see if there are related messages that may provide additional, related information.

Furthermore, you can check asl.log for the messages corresponding to those in system.log. Records in asl.log are time-stamped in GMT, unlike those in system.log which are time-stamped in local time. Unless you know your shift from GMT, you can use the Filter field in the Console window for asl.log, searching for a subset of the message text, to find the corresponding messages in asl.log. Then you can determine if they are serious errors or can be ignored. You may also learn more useful information regarding what called for the message to be logged.

For example, the following message in system.log:

Oct 12 16:06:44 PMG5 lookupd[930]: lookupd (version 365) starting - Wed Oct 12 16:06:44 2005

is also logged in the following format in asl.log:

[Time 2005.10.12 21:06:44 UTC] [Facility netinfo] [Sender lookupd] [PID 930] [Message lookupd (version 365) starting - Wed Oct 12 16:06:44 2005] [Level 5] [UID -2] [GID -2] [Host PMG5]

The Level field in the asl.log version, i.e.

[Level 5]

indicates the severity of the message. Anything with a Level ≥ 5 can be ignored. Levels 3 and 4 are errors and warnings, respectively. Levels < 3 are severe conditions.

Note that some of the information above is from Appendix 2, "System Logging" of my book, Troubleshooting Mac® OS X, Tiger Edition.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

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Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X