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mds is the TSA of the Mac
Haven't posted in forever, but thought I'd post about this tidbit that I have discovered about Macs. Recently, as in the past few months, I've noticed that my Mac has become slower and more difficult to handle. Specifically, I'll start up several programs when I start my day, and everything freezes for a while as though it needs to deal with the idea that I've started up these programs and needs to spend some time finding them. The spinning beach ball of doom is prevalent.
Then, throughout the day, just opening another program (ESPECIALLY Adobe Reader) resulted in my Mac slowing down to unusable for minutes at a time. Also, iTunes would periodically just pause...no reason seemed to be given.
I finally got sick of this and decided this morning to do some research. Well, I lie...I did some research earlier, but just didn't have the time to follow up on it. Today I realized just how much valuable time I've been losing to this and decided that time was better spent researching the problem. I brought up Activity Monitor and found that the process mds was chewing up not just CPU time, but an incredible amount of virtual memory...as much as 6 GB (I have 6 GB of actual memory on the machine). That's WAY too much for any process to need.
So I did some research on mds and found it was connected to Spotlight. Now, I don't really use Spotlight, an indexing program, on my Mac much. It's nice to occasionally do a search, but it doesn't happen often enough to merit justifying it. Still, I didn't want to privatize my entire Mac because Spotlight needed to see everything....EVERYTHING...that my Mac had on it.
I did realize that it really didn't need to index my additional harddrives...almost all of which were archives (save for the Bootcamp drive which, again, didn't need to be indexed). Also, I didn't need my Dropbox indexed, or Elf's music folder (which is ENORMOUS...the man has too much music) when I connected to his harddrive. So I privatized all of those.
So far I haven't had any stoppages, but it's only been a little while. We'll see if this continues and has solved my problem. I hope so, because I don't want to do something drastic, like privatize everything, or reinstall the OS.
Then, throughout the day, just opening another program (ESPECIALLY Adobe Reader) resulted in my Mac slowing down to unusable for minutes at a time. Also, iTunes would periodically just pause...no reason seemed to be given.
I finally got sick of this and decided this morning to do some research. Well, I lie...I did some research earlier, but just didn't have the time to follow up on it. Today I realized just how much valuable time I've been losing to this and decided that time was better spent researching the problem. I brought up Activity Monitor and found that the process mds was chewing up not just CPU time, but an incredible amount of virtual memory...as much as 6 GB (I have 6 GB of actual memory on the machine). That's WAY too much for any process to need.
So I did some research on mds and found it was connected to Spotlight. Now, I don't really use Spotlight, an indexing program, on my Mac much. It's nice to occasionally do a search, but it doesn't happen often enough to merit justifying it. Still, I didn't want to privatize my entire Mac because Spotlight needed to see everything....EVERYTHING...that my Mac had on it.
I did realize that it really didn't need to index my additional harddrives...almost all of which were archives (save for the Bootcamp drive which, again, didn't need to be indexed). Also, I didn't need my Dropbox indexed, or Elf's music folder (which is ENORMOUS...the man has too much music) when I connected to his harddrive. So I privatized all of those.
So far I haven't had any stoppages, but it's only been a little while. We'll see if this continues and has solved my problem. I hope so, because I don't want to do something drastic, like privatize everything, or reinstall the OS.