MDS 100% CPU problem keeps coming back

[cosmokanga2]

2 weeks ago I started noticing that the MDS process in the Activity Monitor was using 100% CPU and wouldn't quit. Over these 2 weeks I've tried multiple things including twice getting Spotlight to re-index my volumes. I've also deleted the Spotlight prefs however none of the "fixes" have ever lasted longer than a day and now everyday at around 2pm MDS goes all crazy. Quitting the process in Activity Monitor solves the problem, but only for that day.

Any way to figure out what MDS's problem is?

 

[Zyniker]

Have you repaired permissions in Disk Utility?
Have you deleted the Spotlight index and allowed Spotlight to recreate it?

Is your computer scheduled to do anything on a daily basis at or around 14:00?

 

[cosmokanga2]

Turns out the problem seemed to be one of my external hard drives. Draged it to the spotlight privacy pane and and out and it reindexed it. Solved the problem for now.

 

[ryannazaretian]

Another thing to do. If you notice it happening, open up spot light (CMD + Spacebar) and make sure it doesn't have something in the search box. If it does, simply click the (X) to stop searching. I've noticed it gets stuck a lot. Doing this fixes the problem for me.

But yea, you shouldn't have to do that. I think it's a bug. Re-indexing usually makes searches faster, but it still gets stuck in a loop quite a bit.

 

[jpoterbin]

Could be a corrupted flash drive

Could be a corrupted flash drive. I had a similar problem and I tried everything except keeping a close eye on the flash drive. Once a disconnected it and restarted the computer everything was fine. And make sure you disconnect the drive before restarting the computer. It was a sigh of relief for me as I just bought the computer 10 days before.


Also I wasn't able to salvage the drive. Disk utility wouldn't let me repair it or reformat it. So I just grabbed the files I needed and ditched the flash drive.