Tip: Has your iMac been plagued by mdworker?

[Adelante]

Since I installed Leopard, my CPU has been latched onto by the root process mdworker, apparently indexing files for Spotlight, and taking as much as 60-90% of the CPU. Again and again and again. I experienced many crashes and a few kernel panics over a couple of months time and the more time went by, the more frequently it happened until it was an every day occurrence.

Two days ago I finally found a work-around on Google, (which showed the problem is not uncommon), that was simple enough to do.

System Preferences>Spotlight>Privacy

Drag a copy of your hard drive image that's on your desktop into the Privacy pane. That's it.

This would only be good if you don't rely on Spotlight, which I never even use. But it set the problem aside for me until Apple clears it up.

[cbayer]

1. Thank you so much! I also noticed that I was repeatedly getting bogged down

by something going on in the background, but I could not figure out what it was.


I have tried your fix and will post back with an update. I also rarely use spotlight, and I certainly know how to find what I want without it.

Great info!
:hi:

[cbayer]

2. You are my hero! Just a few minutes after doing this, I am seeing a substantial

improvement.

I sure miss having your around in the hot tub.

:cry:

[Adelante]

3. I'm so happy it helped

I'll dive back in one of these terms :hi:

And hit my head :rofl:

[moggie]

4. You can exclude particular folders

It's a shame to exclude your entire disk from Spotlight indexing, since it can be so useful, so it might be worth trying to track down what parts of your system it's trying to index. For example, perhaps you have a huge folder of PDFs which it's repeatedly trying and failing to index, or perhaps you download a lot of files and this is triggering re-indexing of your downloads directory. Or maybe you use Fusion or Parallels and it's trying to grok large virtual disks? You can drag particular folders to Spotlight's privacy tab instead of the whole volume.

I love Spotlight's indexing of PDFs: it's great to search for a word at the system level and have it instantly tell you not only what documents it appears in, but take you direct to the right pages. But I know some people have had trouble with it.