MDS(spotlight) process using ~130MB of Real memory

[bonecandy]

Ah well that's the thing. We're talking about 130mb of PHYSICAL memory. Virtual memory in OS X is something I never worry about. Well so far you can scratch off ~Documents as being the culprit.

 

[janey]

Ah well that's the thing. We're talking about 130mb of PHYSICAL memory. Virtual memory in OS X is something I never worry about. Well so far you can scratch off ~Documents as being the culprit.

My 2 cents.

As long as it's not affecting performance or any other app in any adverse way, why are you doing all the things that have been suggested in this thread so far?

I'm not going off messing around with Colloquy or Safari right now cause they're both chewing up half a gig of physical memory right now. There's something called memory management, it works, my apps work, performance isn't horrible..I'm happy.

 

[mad jew]

If bonecandy wants to find out what's causing this, then why stop him/her? It's strange that Spotlight, or rather MDS, is using this much real memory. I'm also curious as to why it's happening and there doesn't seem to be any harm in finding out.

 

[bonecandy]

My 2 cents.

As long as it's not affecting performance or any other app in any adverse way, why are you doing all the things that have been suggested in this thread so far?

I'm not going off messing around with Colloquy or Safari right now cause they're both chewing up half a gig of physical memory right now. There's something called memory management, it works, my apps work, performance isn't horrible..I'm happy.

Look, I don't get obsessed about any other program because that's how this or that particular program has always been - it's in the code. I know Safari leaks memory all over the place, but there's nothing really I can do to fix it besides helping the development team find those leaks. But this issue is different. I've never seen Spotlight consume this much physical memory. Not on my old G5 (which had many many more files), not on my brother's MacMini which has multiple firewire hard drives connected to it. And apparently none of you have this problem either. This leads me to believe that I CAN change how much memory Spotlight using because it SEEMS to be an issue with my personal system.
I'm not really worried about running into memory issues. I'm just curious as to why this is happening. Can a guy not be curious?

 

[janey]

If bonecandy wants to find out what's causing this, then why stop him/her?...

Oh, I'm fully aware of it all. I just don't really get why someone would spend the effort doing so.

Look, I don't get obsessed about any other program because that's how this or that particular program has always been - it's in the code...

Not everyone's system is the same though, and with an indexing+search utility like Spotlight which is dependent on the contents of your hard drive, I can't see why usage stats wouldn't change Half the reason why I disabled spotlight, cause it's really annoying indexing terabytes of data and on top of that is completely awful when you have old files updating and new files showing up constantly - not necessarily just a large number of files.

It's sort of like how I know Colloquy is taking up 600mb physical memory, but that's only because I have 40 irc channels open in it. Someone with 1 will be using way less than that, probably in the low double digits.

I'm just saying. You seem to be doing an awful lot trying to figure it out, and I guess I just can't understand why you'd want to Having spent all this time in this thread now, I'd like to know what it was that made spotlight do that.

 

[aLoC]

Try looking in /Library/Spotlight, maybe one of your third party apps has installed a Spotlight plugin that is a bit memory greedy.

My folder has:
AppleWorks.mdimporter
iWeb.mdimporter
Keynote.mdimporter
Microsoft Office.mdimporter
Pages.mdimporter
SourceCode.mdimporter

and I don't have the issue, so it probably isn't these ones.

 

[bonecandy]

Oh, I'm fully aware of it all. I just don't really get why someone would spend the effort doing so.


Not everyone's system is the same though, and with an indexing+search utility like Spotlight which is dependent on the contents of your hard drive, I can't see why usage stats wouldn't change Half the reason why I disabled spotlight, cause it's really annoying indexing terabytes of data and on top of that is completely awful when you have old files updating and new files showing up constantly - not necessarily just a large number of files.

It's sort of like how I know Colloquy is taking up 600mb physical memory, but that's only because I have 40 irc channels open in it. Someone with 1 will be using way less than that, probably in the low double digits.

I'm just saying. You seem to be doing an awful lot trying to figure it out, and I guess I just can't understand why you'd want to Having spent all this time in this thread now, I'd like to know what it was that made spotlight do that.

Not everyone's system is the same, but the code for each program is. I'm questioning why the usage stats would change for my system. I copied over almost all my files from my old system, so I don't see why it should be using more memory indexing a smaller amount of files, especially when my computing usage is no different than before. I haven't really downloaded any particularly new applications nor have I been downloading a lot of things recently.
See, your example of Colloquay perfectly logical, but it doesn't apply to my situation. One would expect increased memory usage if you're doing something like in your example. On the surface, to me-the user-, the mds process using this much memory is illogical.
Also, I'm stubborn.


edit- Oh yeah, I've narrowed it down to a list of folders in my Library: 'Address Book Plug-ins' through 'Icons'. I'll remove the folders one by one.
edit2- I'm going to make a guess that it's the caches folder ;P

 

[janey]

edit- Oh yeah, I've narrowed it down to a list of folders in my Library: 'Address Book Plug-ins' through 'Icons'. I'll remove the folders one by one.

Hrm, I wasn't too off. I would have thought it would include ~/Library/Mail and Safari as well, but...App support's still left, so


edit: Are you going to be going through all the folders in Caches looking for the culprit?

 

[bonecandy]

Try looking in /Library/Spotlight, maybe one of your third party apps has installed a Spotlight plugin that is a bit memory greedy.

My folder has:
AppleWorks.mdimporter
iWeb.mdimporter
Keynote.mdimporter
Microsoft Office.mdimporter
Pages.mdimporter
SourceCode.mdimporter

and I don't have the issue, so it probably isn't these ones.

Well, the only file that I have in my folder that's not in yours is: iMovie.mdimporter

 

[gnasher729]

i fail to see why you should be concerned about spotlight's memory usage increasing. I regularly see safari blow past 2gb of virtual memory and don't really care..

In any case, I'll bet my money on ~/Library/App Support or ~/Library in general. Maybe ~/Music or ~/Documents based on what you're doing.

So it seems the problem is not that mds uses a lot of memory, the problem is that he is annoyed because mds uses a lot of memory. Like you go to the doctor and say "it hurts when I do this" and the doctor says "don't do it then!"

 

[bonecandy]

Wouldn't you be annoyed if there was something that was making mds use a lot of memory?
Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've found the culprit. It looks like it's my last.fm folder in my application support folder.

Edit- Yep, seems to be the Last.fm application support folder. I deleted the official last.fm client as well as the folder and downloaded iScrobbler instead. Mds has played nice ever since ;-)

 

[janey]

So it seems the problem is not that mds uses a lot of memory, the problem is that he is annoyed because mds uses a lot of memory. Like you go to the doctor and say "it hurts when I do this" and the doctor says "don't do it then!"

Just like how when you hit your funny bone it hurts, so why hit it. Some things are not indicators of something more serious, like in this case.

Wouldn't you be annoyed if there was something that was making mds use a lot of memory?
Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've found the culprit. It looks like it's my last.fm folder in my application support folder.

Okay, so please tell me how I was wrong I said systems are unique, and you might be doing something that may have been affecting Spotlight. And well, if last.fm was doing it, then there you go.

 

[bonecandy]

So it seems the problem is not that mds uses a lot of memory, the problem is that he is annoyed because mds uses a lot of memory. Like you go to the doctor and say "it hurts when I do this" and the doctor says "don't do it then!"

No, because normally mds doesn't use that much memory - it shouldn't be. There was something in the last.fm folder that IMMEDIATELY made it bloat up to almost EXACTLY 130mb, give or take a couple of MB. As soon as I took the last.fm folder out of the spotlight privacy tab, I watched the Activity monitor show mds immediately jump from 5-10mb to around 130. Everytime. Perhaps the files was corrupted in some way when I copied them over from my G5. Although, we'll never know, because I deleted them in the midst of my triumph . D'oh.

I said systems are unique, and you might be doing something that may have been affecting Spotlight. And well, if last.fm was doing it, then there you go.

That's exactly what I've been saying! lol! ;-) Perhaps in different words. I was trying to explain this when i said, "This leads me to believe that I CAN change how much memory Spotlight using because it SEEMS to be an issue with my personal system." It WAS an issue with my system that was making Spotlight use a lot of memory (hell, my index database is only 60mb!).
Anyway, the situation has been resolved. Mds is using an appropriate amount of memory. Everyone is happy. I think. At least I am

 

[mad jew]

Mate, I'm impressed. Thanks for following this all up with your results, too.

 

[omissis]

my mds did even better

hello,
I was looking for a solution because I verified the same issue with mds, but my cpu usage was about 90% and memory usage was about 500-520 mb (on a powerbook 12" G4 1,33 768 mb ram) ... it started this behavior after 5-6 hours of work, I can't get why it leaked this way, I wasn't even able to use the gui because everything get frozen. After a while I finally killed mds, installed the last quicktime update and rebooted. After rebooting, spotlight's icon has the spot in the middle of the lens, so I guess it was a re-indexing issue...
Anyway it's a bad behavior, tiger was smoother

 

[sfinktah]

If you want to find out which folders have a lot of files in them, (which I assume is what is spiking mds usage - mine is 400mb real, 800mb virtual)... you can try this little command from your terminal window:

export IFS=$'\n'; rm -f /tmp/numfiles.txt; for x in `find . -type d -depth 1`; do echo `find "$x" | wc -l` $x | tee -a /tmp/numfiles.txt; done; sort -n /tmp/numfiles.txt

That will give you an ordered list of how many files in each folder (plus a bit of messy output as it's processing, which you can ignore).

1227 ./Music
1581 ./webtosh
2082 ./Desktop
2291 ./pbx
2802 ./Audio
8281 ./Movies
10305 ./.Trash
17235 ./web2
19402 ./Documents
30894 ./Downloads
68839 ./Pictures
72492 ./Library
249215 ./dev

If you need to investigate further, you can change into the directory in question (cd dirname) and run it again.