Having performed a clean install of Sierra I have had no problems other than MS Office misbehaving. However, now, after a month my MDP got hot and the fans started to run. I have restarted several times and left it alone for a couple of hours but I am still seeing cpu use on Activity Monitor.
Any suggestions please?
One reason for excessive mdutil and other Spotlight-related activity is the presence of virtualization software. If you use Parallels or similar software, exclude its virtual disk image from Spotlight indexing. Follow the instructions under "Privacy pane" in macOS Sierra: Spotlight System Preferences.
Spotlight also will index the contents of all mounted volumes. Exclude Windows partitions in the same manner.
You don't need to use any clever Terminal commands. Please read How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support.
Everytime that you boot your Mac, there will be mdworker activity for the first few minutes. If you have a Time Machine drive connected, it is a necessary requirement that Spotlight will index it too — even if you put the Time Machine drive in your Spotlight Privacy panel.
Thanks for your replies. It turned out to be something to do with Office 2011 error reporting. A MS update sorted it out. But I'm still having trouble with Powerpoint under Sierra. I loose the clipboard regularly and have to reboot the program to get it back. Baaa...
Sounds like a problem with spotlight. Go to Terminal and recreate yout spotlight-Index:
sudo mdutil -E /
than wait and try it again.
mdworker, md_stores, mds using CPU
