On Oct 21, 2008, at 8:56 AM, Jeffrey Engle wrote:
> > Just curious.... using an external FW800 drive to boot from, when the > system boots, activity monitor say's that mds (root) and mdworker > (user) eat up 50-90 percent of my processor? what with that? thanks, > Jeff mds and mdworker are the two 'under the hood' parts of Spotlight. When they're doing stuf fit's not unusual fro them to glom on to as much CPU as everything else will let 'em. The key here is as everything else will let them. Those processes will surrender CPU to almost any other process, so you only see the really high CPU load when a) your computer isn't doing anything else and B) they have a lot to index. If they're ramping up all the time, your Spotlight indexes may well be corrupted. here is a good spotlight troubleshooting guide: <http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html> When I had this problem the solution was: using the mdutil command to stop indexing on all my volumes : sudo mdutil -i off /path_to_volume Then disabling spotlight: modify /etc/hostconfig to read: SPOTLIGHT=-NO- Then to get rid of the existing index, run these two commands from Terminal: mdutil -i off / mdutil -E / Then rebooting. Find the hidden directories ".Spotlight-V100" (if any) at the root of each volume and delete them. Then I rebooted, turned Spotlight back on, re-enabled indexing modify /etc/hostconfig to read: SPOTLIGHT=-YES- mdutil -i ON / and then, crucially, LEFT THE SYSTEM ALONE for the couple hours it took to properly index everything. After that, not a problem from Spotlight. You'll still see those two processes running a lot and glomming ontp CPU, but only whil your computer is unoccupied doing anything else. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
