process help

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Hi experts,

I just got my tibook back from apple care for a logic board problem. It is much more sluggish now. when running activity monitor, two processes mdimport and mds consistently use much of my cpu. Any idea what these are. I can quit them or restart, and they just pop right back up.

Cheers,

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[ElectricSheep]

Hi experts,

I just got my tibook back from apple care for a logic board problem. It is much more sluggish now. when running activity monitor, two processes mdimport and mds consistently use much of my cpu. Any idea what these are. I can quit them or restart, and they just pop right back up.

Cheers,

Thumb

mds stands for MetaData Server, and mdimport stands for MetaData Importer. Those two processes are used by the Spotlight searching system. The MetaData server handles actual searches, and the MetaData Importer scours your hard disk gathering information about files and their contents to build the Spotlight Index that mds uses.

mds and mdimport will use a lot of CPU time if you are rebuidling the Spotlight Index--they have to process just about every file on your disk. Just let it run, and it will eventually finish.