Mdworker, using all the resources, apps not responding

[chipandegg]

A couple of days a ago, I noticed there was lots of chatter coming from the hard drive.* I also noticed that the Mac Pro was very slow at doing most things, lots of beach balls and applications not responding.* Right now, all I can hear is the HDD
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I opened up activity monitor and noticed that a process name called - mdworker - was using 8.83GB or Real Mem and around 11.80GB of Virtual Mem.* These figures fluctuate, the Virtual Mem has gone as high as 14GB.* Sometimes the process goes down very low to say below a GB, then rises again.
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I have 10GB of ram installed inside the mac.* Furthermore, I've seen 100%of CPU use though mdworker.
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I've been reading about this problem, lots of advice says to move the HDD image to the privacy pane on spotlight as this is a indexing/spotlight issue, though I still want to use spotlight.

Didn't mean for it to have stars in, copied this starlight from a another forum where I've posted.


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Will this process ever end, or is there a way to stop it, as is using up all the resources?
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The only thing I've installed of late is a music plug-in called Geist and an expansion pack which came with it.
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Right now I can't rally use my mac like before, I'm writing this on an iPad.
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Any help would be great, as the mac is integeral part of m work.

 

[GGJstudios]

If a drive is constantly active or your CPU utilization is high (possibly with increased temps and fan speed) when you're not running any apps, check to see if Spotlight is indexing by looking at the Menu Bar icon:

(not indexing)

(dot pulsing = indexing)
​

Also, mdworker will consume system resources until the indexing is complete. The best thing to do is to let it finish the initial index, which can take several hours. Once it's complete, maintaining and updating the index will be very quick and won't use resources to any noticeable degree.