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WOAH! 30GB VM size? Need help! Macbook dying!

Littleodie914

Littleodie914

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 9, 2004
1,813
8
Rochester, NY
Hey guys, I'm having a bit of trouble with my macbook. (Actually, I'm having a bit of trouble typing this too, as you'll see why!) Everything is suuuuper twitchy, and rollover effects (like buttons, etc.) are taking up to 10 seconds to appear. I did the first logical thing and checked Activity Monitor, only to find this! Any ideas how to get my memory back? I'm guessing mdworker is the problem, and after a bit of googling I found it was related to spotlight, but I don't know how to fix the problem. I checked the spotlight icon, and nothing's being indexed... I don't know what to do! My poor lappy's almost unusable! Thanks! :eek:
 

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Reboot. See if that stops that process going nuts next time! A quick search indicates it's a Spotlight process. Have you just attached a removable disk or something?
 
See if you can stop that process. Either that or turn off the macbook remove the battery and put the battery back in try that. Leave the battery out for a good while.

repair permissions. You know the drill.
 
Ah thanks for the help guys, I ended up finding an article on macosxhints.com to disable spotlight, and that fixed the problem. Now though, I can't use spotlight! Any ideas on how to actually fix the problem without entirely disabling the process? :)
 
You likely don't have to completely disable Spotlight. A simple reboot should have fixed the problem...did it not? Sometimes you just get processes that are a bit over-exuberant and a reboot fixes the problem.
 
WildCowboy said:
You likely don't have to completely disable Spotlight. A simple reboot should have fixed the problem...did it not? Sometimes you just get processes that are a bit over-exuberant and a reboot fixes the problem.
Click to expand...
Nope, rebooted 3 different times. Each time it started up, I gave it about 10 seconds and tried to open something, and bam. Totally soggy. :rolleyes:
 
Cromulent said:
Interesting, just checked my Mac Pro and it has 9.5GB allocated to VM. What kind of numbers does everyone else have? I mean what is considered normal? This is with 2GB of RAM.
Click to expand...

7-10 GB is pretty normal, but it depends on what apps you're running. Note that the number is usually pretty meaningless...it's simply an upper limit on the amount of VM that could be used by the programs you have running. They almost invariably are using much, much, much less.
 
Cromulent said:
Interesting, just checked my Mac Pro and it has 9.5GB allocated to VM. What kind of numbers does everyone else have? I mean what is considered normal? This is with 2GB of RAM.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's pretty normal. Mine is currently 18.04 GB on my PM G5 with 1.5 GB RAM. It's nothing to worry about.
 
Littleodie914

i don't have a solution to your problem...
but i do have a suggestion.

i would think that an Archive and Install should clear up any issues you're having with spotlight since it is almost definitely a system problem.
 
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