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TICKET ARCHIVE -> mds hogging the cpu -- and quitting unex

xpb - Nov 13, 2007 - 4:35 pm

What IS mods? And who asked it to run flat out, soaking up all my cpu cycles?

For the last 2 years, whenever I ran a backup, sometime during the backup I got a message that "mds quit unexpectedly". I figured there was some conflict between mds and the backup, but the backup never seemed to have suffered.

But recently (perhaps since OS 10.4.10 ??) I get "mds quit unexpectedly" several times a day. I also get moments when response is very very sluggish. At those times, Activity Monitor shows 100% cpu utlization, with mds taking about half.

How can I tame mds? And what is it doing, anyway?

xpb - Nov 14, 2007 - 10:43 pm

Update: I continue to see mds taking all available cpu cycles. However, it appears that the unresponsiveness I was experiencing may have been due to something else --possibly a website whose display invokes a Flash Player in a way that makes my browser unresponsive. I remain curious about what enormous calculation mds is doing, and why it crashes, but I don't necessarily blame it for my Mac's periods of unresponsiveness.

(Also, I thought I'd fixed my typo, where I wrote "mods" when I meant "mds"... but apparently not.)

xpb - Nov 15, 2007 - 10:33 pm

Google searches led me to mdutil.
I tried the terminal command
sudo mdutil -E /
This provoked an initial flurry of mds activity (I presume to rebuild the index)
but since then mds activity has dropped back to a mere 8% of cpu.
So perhaps the problem was a corrupted index causing a loop?

However, during this morning's backup (after I'd used mdutil -E)
mds again quit unexpectedly during the backup (done by BBBackup v 7.1.3)

TechSupport - Nov 18, 2007 - 10:40 pm

We apologize for not being able to resolve the issue you asked of us. It is the absolute worst case scenario for us to do this. In our review of why this happens, it generally is related to either the particular issue being addressed or frequently, incomplete or incorrect information provided. We hope by moving your request to the public forums that you will be able to get a solution without leaving you empty handed.

Your ticket has been closed with our support team. Your request has just been posted to Mac OS X System & Mac Software and is available for your viewing at:

http://macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=296540

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