Why the high energy use by Spotlight after upgrade to High Sierra?

Question

Level 1

22 points

Why the high energy use by Spotlight after upgrade to High Sierra?

Hi everyone,

I upgraded to High Sierra from Sierra more than a week ago. For about the past week, Spotlight has been using significant energy, even though there is nothing telling me that it is indexing. Spotlight appears under the battery level menu in Finder as "Using Significant Energy" all the time, so much so that the battery drains noticeably when I use the MacBook on battery power. Battery power drops by one percentage point about every two minutes. Activity Monitor show mds_stores as using between 50 per cent and 130 per cent CPU and Spotlight using a lot of juice.

Time Machine, Safari, and Photos Agent also appear as using significant energy but not as often as Spotlight. The MacBook is warmer than usual. Time Machine has not backed up my files since October 5th, so I suspect Spotlight is a problem. Time Machine prepares a backup for what seems like eternity and then does nothing.

I know it takes time for some background processes to finish what they need to do after upgrading to a new OS, but one week seems like a long time, and I'll have to turn to different backup software because Time Machine is not doing its thing. Any thoughts or suggestions about this problem would be much appreciated.

Sincerely,

Greg

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) with 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB flash drive, and running High Sierra 10.13.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch,Early 2015), macOS Sierra (10.12.4), null

Posted on Oct 15, 2017 10:20 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

himawarialive

Level 1

17 points

Dec 22, 2017 5:38 PM in response to xmetienne

Hi, I'm having the same problem. Recently I notice that my MacBook Pro battery is significantly dropped, and then I tried to look at the battery status and found that spotlight app uses the battery power significantly and sometimes it causes Wifi connection lost and my MacBook Pro crashed. It's so annoying, especially when I focus doing some works.

I tried using the etrecheck, the result is too long and I saved it as a pdf file, but I cannot attach it here.

Anyone having the solution to this problem?

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Answer 2

Feb 14, 2018 3:46 PM in response to Lypny

I was having a similar issue where my MacBook Pro (2017) battery would not last long and when plugged in would get really hot and eventually hang. I Googled around and found that this was often attributed to the indexing of Creative Cloud Files, Dropbox, Google Drive File Stream, VMWare virtual machines and backup apps like CrashPlan. So in System Preferences -> Spotlight on the Privacy tab I added those (except CrashPlan, which I don't use) to the list of "Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations:" and it's fixed!

Hope this can help you and anyone else with this issue!

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Answer 3

nc9602

Level 1

4 points

Dec 15, 2017 5:45 PM in response to Lypny

I know this is a late response but I had the same issue, disabled spotlight from indexing Macintosh HD and it went away, as soon as you allowed indexing again the CPU usage came back right away. I went to start working on a show and the whole system is useless without spotlight so I ended up having downgrading back to 10.11.6, at least you can still find it in the purchases section of the App Store.

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Answer 4

xmetienne

Level 2

192 points

Dec 15, 2017 5:57 PM in response to Lypny

Hi Lypni,

Could you download etrecheck run it and share its results herein? Maybe one of us might able to find out from where the issue is coming from!

Please note that Etrecheck is a very useful reporting app that can be used to pinpoint issue, a lot of support communities members are using it and it is also a safe application not divulging any private data.

Please let me know if it was helpful otherwise we'll look for another solution!

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Answer 5

rashbash

Level 1

13 points

Feb 1, 2018 3:28 AM in response to himawarialive

I have exactly the same problem, Spotlight using so much energy that laptop is hot (unto 67 degrees C) and becomes slower and drains battery within few minutes. This is so annoying that I am seriously thinking about selling my Macbook on eBay and getting android machine - Apple has started to do act worse than Windows with like more customers leaving than joining.... My work place is still windows and works well, and thank God we didn't change our 100 plus computers to Mac ....

If anyone has a solution, pl let us know before I sell this hot potato on my lap !!!!

Rashid

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