mds excessive memory usage

mds and mdworker are the spotlight file indexing tasks. They should quiet down after a while, but it may take an hour or two under certain circumstances.

Slowness could indicate Directory problems that might be fixed by a Disk Utility (Repair disk). If repairs are actually needed, you will need to use Disk Utility while booted from Recovery_HD, or restart in safe mode (which does the repair as it starts up) followed by restarting in regular mode.

Corrupt index then and time to delete and have it create a new index.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=rebuild+mac+spotlight+index+and+database+mds

XBitlab and others have how to tips and instructions, very easy to do.

Not something a disk check will find, though it is a good idea to use Recovery Mode and repair your system drive.

I would also look at and remove 3rd party drivers and extensions and background processes as much as possible.

I assume could also index in Safe Mode.

Having the system on an SSD helps. Would help more to have the freedom to move the spotlight index off the sytem drive, maybe have an index for a drive be on the drives themselves.

10GB of memory is out of control. It isn't multithreaded or wasn't in the past, so you should also be seeing 100-110% activity showing.

This is one time where you want to do one or two long extra steps it seems.

Clone a drive with CCC with advanced option to do checksums on all files copied (and we are talking whole drive)

scan drive for bad or weak sectors. SoftRAID 4.x does that all the time in the background and on all I/Os

SMART Utility may be good choice also or use to but something that maps out.

TechTool Pro scans and finds weak or bad sectors but then would say "you need to zero or do a 3-way write erase with Disk Utility"

I had some files of zero size but locked and would not go away that I needed to get rid of before I could safely use the drive / copy files

Disk Utility does not look at files and whether they are valid. Dlloyd has a file integrity checker too. Disk Warrior will if you use OPTION key on REBUID where it will then skip the directory and scavenge the entire drive and build a new directory based on what is actually on drive and found. Can take days in some cases.

And you don't know where or what files and drive volume it is that triggers this. But it is so beyond normal I have no idea what would cause Splotlight MDS process to hog 10GB RAM.

I have the same problem, with the amount of memory mds using only limited by my disk size. When I had a 1TB HDD, it would grow to over 100GB and the machine would become unusable. Now I'm running on a new SSD and it grows until the (smaller) disk fills up, about 60TB, then the machine crashes. I've tried every fix I've seen and the only thing that works is turning off spotlight, which is most unfortunate. Seems Apple products just aren't as good as the mythology suggests!

I have the same problem.

But my MDS is oscillating between using all memory and using very little - about every 10 seconds. I force quit it, and it came back using much less memory and more stable, but got worse again in five minutes.

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See my comment above.

My MDS seems ok now. All I did was force quit it from the Activity Monitor window, and it returned to normal. It had a five minute glitch, but then returned to normal. Been ok for a whole day now.

R