mds_stores cpu

Made a shocking discovery and discovered the actual culprit:

It turned out to be the Pinterest Pin It Addon on my Firefox browser.

I started getting suspicious when mds_stores was finally quiet and then when I started up Firefox, mds_stores immediately went to 100% CPU. Incredible. I previously thought it was Dropbox or Google Backup but with mds_stores suddenly going bonkers once I started Firefox I started wondering if maybe it was Firefox after all.

So I stopped using dropbox, Google Backup and Firefox for a couple of days and mds_stores was quiet as a mouse. I finally had a computer again.

Then I started up Firefox again and mds_stores IMMEDIATELY went to 100% usage again. I tested further by disabling the addons once mds_stores calmed down again, and nothing triggered it until I enabled the Pinterest extension, and then RIGHT ON CUE back to 100%.

Unbelievable, all this because of a Pin It button that is OFFICIALLY provided by Pinterest. To say I'm angry is an understatement. How do you build such a crap addon that can create these kinds of problems and why on God's earth would a Pin It button even need Spotlight to begin with.

Even though it's not Firefox related, I'm removing it altogether as I also fault them for not having safeguards in the code that could prevent addons for running amuck like this. Just awful. I think there's a good reason why Apple is suddenly keeping extensions tightly controlled and part of the App Store now.

Hope this helps someone, aside from remote drives commonly being the culprit in excessive Spotlight loads, the browser you use with particular addons could also be to blame.

There must be multiple reasons why mds_stores is running amok.

Concurrent with mds_stores CPU usage and CPU fans running constantly for many, many weeks (or longer - it snuck up on me), I also found I had failures with Time Machine backups that was also failing to complete. Possibly related, possibly unrelated, but one of the following fixed both issues:

• I disabled Spotlight for the Time Machine (backup) volume which was on an external disk
• I deleted the directory /Previous System

Ever since, both Time Machine and Spotlight have been working properly and no CPU fans running for over a week. The difference is very obvious and pleasant.

I do know why Time Machine was failing after extracting the failures in the logging system with this command:

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info --last 1h | grep -F 'eMac' | grep -Fv 'etat' | awk -F']' '{print substr($0,1,19), $NF}'

There was a file in the Previous Systems folder that had the immutable bit set, and the Time Machine backup was trying to set some indicator on that file (and failing) causing it to retry constantly but never able to complete a backup (which is a flaw in Time Machine). In my case the Previous Systems folder was old -- I tarred it up, copied it onto an external drive, and then deleted it (I had to first unset the immutable bit on the offending files).

I'm not sure if Spotlight was having an issue with something in the same directory (Previous Systems) or it was related to the Time Machine volume or a combination of both.

I don't care either way - because it's now working with no CPU fans -- the first time in what could in fact be months without me realising.

IMHO there's a corrupted file that loops mds-store for indexing it.

If something is wrong on the disk, the Check Disk function is not always reliable as Disk Warrior.

Have you tried disabling completely Spotlight: sudo mdutil -a -i off?

It’s a supposition, of course. A Spotlights doesn’t stop working I believe it’s in a loop with something. Of course might be one or more files or even sonething else. But I can’t help further. I could if you had the possibility to check the disk with Disk Warrior.

The only solution I can see is reinstall everything from scratch hoping it isn’a document created by an App.

(what about running Etrecheck?)

I'm having the same problem, mds_stores 100% constant. In my case it started with my old 2014 MacBook Pro some time after installing Mojave. I recently bought a new MacBook Pro 2018 and decided to do a fresh install on it rather than a backup restore because I was having so many issues with the old MacBook, and thought with a new MacBook and fresh install surely my troubles would be over.

And yet the ^@&*ing issue followed me to a brand new computer. How the ****...

I started noticing the issue when my flagged emails would no longer show up. Rebooting fixes it for five seconds, then it disappears again. Since this is indexed by Spotlight it's definitely Spotlight related, but I only recently came to realize mds_stores was going nuts in the background today, because the first time I used my shiny, shiny new MacBook touted as having 10 hours of battery life, my battery died in only 3 hours.

All because of mds_stores.

By any chance are you using any mail account from Microsoft Exchange? I thought it might have been this but I'm fairly certain I can rule it out for now.

Can you post an Etrecheck as well? The only thing I can think of is that there's a rogue app that's triggering Spotlight to index forever. If we have a common app between us it might be the culprit. I can't conceive of this being a corrupted file when the computer is brand new and the only thing ported over was from iCloud (such as documents and photos).

That this would happen across two different computers at least tells me the problem is software related.

Took some steps that has simmered down mds_stores for now:

Deleted my Exchange account and then re-added it via Internet Accounts in Settings, and only enabled Mail. Had to download thousands of emails, but whatever.

Also closed DropBox and Google Backup and Sync. I think that's the only thing I did notably differently, and so far mds_stores is finally at 0.0 CPU usage. I think I'll need to keep these two apps closed for a while and see how it goes. Simply closing them before didn't appear to do anything, so maybe there's a significant time delay before seeing results which might be why this is so vexing to troubleshoot. From everything I read though, one of the biggest culprits of mds_stores going wild is when remote drive services are used.

I would try closing these apps if you have them, then set it so they don't start up again when you reboot the machine, then reboot the machine and see how it goes when they're not running at all. It's possible that Spotlight still has to to continue a while indexing one more time while these applications are closed, and then finally, FINALLY, when that index concludes the loop will at long last break, since the offending apps aren't running to trigger it again.

Yep, it's still holding several days later. I tested it a few times to see if I could consistently trigger it too, and it did every time.

Completely bewildering. I sent a complaint to Pinterest as well, though doubt they'll do anything about it because they're idiots. When it's just Firefox, things are fine, so it was a combo of this extension with Firefox. What in the **** a button to pin stuff to Pinterest has to do with Spotlight Indexing is beyond me. No wonder it was so difficult to troubleshoot, there's no obvious relation there at all

I removed Firefox and even scrubbed Pinterest extension from Safari (which didn't cause issues). I'm sure Apple gets some of the blame, but it's inexcusable for Firefox as well to not have any apparent safeguard in place to keep addons from running amuck. Never again.

Back to Chrome now. You win Google.

Hope this was also what was vexxing you as well, and you finally resolve the issue too.

You're welcome, consider it an early Christmas gift.

Everything I read would have suggested this was a remote drive issue, where Spotlight is trying to index an ever changing remote folder and never quite completes. That would have made sense. Nothing about this makes sense, but I'm sure going to be a lot more careful about what I install on my machine now.

Cheers and hope this is finally the end of it!