Tiger: what is the 'mds' process

[mainstreetmark]

I have a process popping up every so often called "mds" by Activity Monitor. I can't work out what it does or where it's running from.

The reason I ask, is it starts using up like 30 or so percent of my CPU.

I'm trying to track down all these beachballs i'm suddenly getting on my PB17 1.33GHz/1G ram. Annoying.

 

[DXoverDY]

I have a process popping up every so often called "mds" by Activity Monitor. I can't work out what it does or where it's running from.

The reason I ask, is it starts using up like 30 or so percent of my CPU.

I'm trying to track down all these beachballs i'm suddenly getting on my PB17 1.33GHz/1G ram. Annoying.

taking a guess here.. MDS Meta Data Something... so related to spotlight. spotlight probably makes itself available as a service so that's what that is.

 

[micsaund]

Slightly OT:

I noticed that I had a "DashboardC" process running (only showed in top, not in the GUI monitor and I could not figure-out how to widen the top output to see past the "C") that was eating 50% of my CPU last night. I needed the CPU for another process that was fighting with it, so it was not a case of just using idle time. I did a kill on the process and it then played nice and dropped to an occasional 3% or so of the CPU (most times, 0%). I had just installed several new widgets, so maybe something had gone wacky with that, but I don't know for sure.

Anyone else seen this?

Mike

 

[Makosuke]

I was wondering this myself; at one point it started chewing up almost an entire processor (on a dual system) for a little while. After that I watched it for a bit, as it's is still running in the background, and it seems to hop up to 3-5% use every once in a while.

Hopefully somebody will be able to clue us in on what it does.

 

[seisdrum]

I was wondering this myself; at one point it started chewing up almost an entire processor (on a dual system) for a little while. After that I watched it for a bit, as it's is still running in the background, and it seems to hop up to 3-5% use every once in a while.

Hopefully somebody will be able to clue us in on what it does.

I found that

http://www.macintouch.com/tiger12.html

It really seems to be a part of Spotlight, namely the indexer.

There's some way to disable it for certain mounted volumes, a command line tool that you should invoke via Terminal:

>mdutil

or better at first

>man mdutil

To really change anything, you need to be root / have root access, and hence you'll probably use

>sudo

Hope that helps ... to post it here, even if it's an old thread. I found it via google.

 

[Sean Zhu]

Slightly OT:

I noticed that I had a "DashboardC" process running (only showed in top, not in the GUI monitor and I could not figure-out how to widen the top output to see past the "C") that was eating 50% of my CPU last night. I needed the CPU for another process that was fighting with it, so it was not a case of just using idle time. I did a kill on the process and it then played nice and dropped to an occasional 3% or so of the CPU (most times, 0%). I had just installed several new widgets, so maybe something had gone wacky with that, but I don't know for sure.

Anyone else seen this?

Mike

"DashboardC" is probably DashboardClient which is Dashboard. Its app file is located in the Dock app at /System/Coreservices/. (The Dashboard app in /Applications only tells Dashboard to start of show itself.)

 

[Saladinos]

Yes, MDS is Spotlight.

 

[DoFoT9]

Yes, MDS is Spotlight.

just adding a bit of proof..

http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/mds.8.html