On 10/05/2005, at 10:25 AM, Ramon Tate wrote:
Hi, all,
Just couldn't resist the local MicroMart's $50 rebate offer for Tiger, so I sprang for it today and installed it as an upgrade of a bootable Firewire clone of my current 10.2.8 system (1GHz eMac SuperDrive 512 MB). After rebooting into the new system and setting a few preferences, I noticed a lot of disk activity on the 2 Firewire drives I've got (the booted system and a backup that keeps a clone of the 10.2.8 system). Looking at the Activity Monitor showed a process called "mdimport" that was running as user "unknown" that was doing a lot of disk activity and using up a lot of cpu time. What is this, and why is it looking at the other drives on my system? Will it continue to hog my resources (I'm now booted back in 10.2.8)?
As Galen said, this is part of spotlight - it's the metadata import. It'll run for several hours (depending on how much data you have) building the initial spotlight database. Mine took a bit over 2 hours for the 18GB data I have on top of the tiger install, I've heard other friends with much larger drives seeing intensive activity for up to 8 hours.
Once it's settled down mdimport takes under 1% CPU time and only jumps into action when data is written to the disk, to keep the spotlight database up to date. If it's worrying, it can't hurt to leave the machine booted into Tiger overnight, and then use it normally from then on :).
dana -- http://www.danaquarium.com/
-- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and...
Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! |
Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html>
iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[email protected]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/>
--------------------------------------------------------------- iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
