What the heck is "mdimport"?

[Millwood]

So I'm casually surfing the web, firefox is the only app running (of course there are background stuff going on) and my fan keeps whining. So i check the activity monitor and see a program named "mdimport" running and using 69%, 80.8%, 90% memory, and it fluctuates all sorts of high percentages.

What exactly is this and why does it continually run and cause my fan to keep whining on and using so much cpu %? If I choose quit process, it just comes back.

 

[JNB]

http://www.help2go.com/Tutorials/Running_Processes/mdimport_:_What_is_it?.html

When running top or another system activity monitor on your Mac with OS X, you may notice a process called mdimport which is taking up a lot of resources. What does it do?

mdimport is a crucial process for Spotlight, the OS X file indexing engine. It is short for "metadata datastore import", and whenever you create or copy new files to your Mac, this process kicks off. It imports file data into a database so that Spotlight can find the correct file when you perform a search.

From a Terminal command line, run "man mdimport" and all of the ways you can run mdimport will be displayed.

When you see mdimport, you are also likely to see LAServer running as well.

 

[Millwood]

Thank you for the info.

I never use spotlight, never really had the use for it. So it seems like something I don't really need it to do if it's working that hard.

 

[mad jew]

Yeah, it shouldn't be working that hard all the time unless you've just added a massive bunch of files to your machine or a connected drive that needs indexing.