OSX: Spotlight problem

Quick OSX tip: if you’re finding that your OSX system is quite busy even though you haven’t asked anything of it, check to see if the processes “mds” and “mdworker” are chewing up CPU cycles (view active processes in Activity Monitor).

If so, then this is Spotlight indexing your hard drive. If it seems excessive, try going into System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy and adding your whole hard drive. This will stop Spotlight from indexing it and everything should calm down for a while. After a few minutes, take your whole hard drive off of Privacy so that Spotlight will index it again.

This process seems to solve over-indexing problems of Spotlight. It will index a bit once you take your hard drive off of Privacy, but it will index a normal amount, instead of hours and hours on end. I’ve had this problem on several machines, especially when migrating to a new system or installing a new hard drive.

BTW, this process will not make Spotlight work better. It’ll still take forever to find anything useful. But at least its indexing won’t be destroying your battery life.