{"id":2146,"date":"2016-08-12T08:24:45","date_gmt":"2016-08-12T08:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.icantinternet.org\/?p=2146"},"modified":"2020-08-19T11:43:48","modified_gmt":"2020-08-19T11:43:48","slug":"mac-os-x-process-mds-is-taking-up-all-your-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/mac-os-x-process-mds-is-taking-up-all-your-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Mac OS X: process “MDS” is taking up all your memory? What is MDS?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I bet you know the problem: you Mac is getting slower and slower, and when opening \u201cActivity Monitor\u201d you see that a process called MDS <\/em>is eating your memory, and using quite some processing power of your precious little Mac.
So you wonder\u2026 What is this \u201cMDS\u201d thing anyway, and how do I get rid of it, or at least control it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is MDS? And what does MDS do? <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Mac<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

What MDS does is quite easy to explain. Do you know the little looking glass in the upper right corner of your screen? It\u2019s called \u201cSpotlight\u201d and it finds anything you want on your Mac<\/a>. However, Spotlight has a little helper, a Watson if you will. This Watson of Spotlight is called \u201cmds\u201d, and what it does is index your hard drive, so that when you want to use Spotlight to find something you need, Spotlight already has the indexed information ready to search.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to control MDS? <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Normally, mds is a small little process that should not\u00a0bother you too much. It shouldn\u2019t eat too much memory, and it shouldn\u2019t use too much of your processor\u2019s time. However, when your disk gets corrupted, or the metadata file of Spotlight<\/em> gets bad, it may be that mds\u2019s resources usages gets out of bound.
First thing to do when this happens? Run the Disk Utility to make sure it isn\u2019t your hard drive that is going berserk. If this would be the problem, act\u00a0fast, and start making backups!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If that is ok, you can instruct MDS to clear out the metadata cache and rebuild it totally from scratch using this command run from Terminal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sudo mdutil -avE<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And should you, for some bizarre reason, want to disable Spotlight completely<\/em>, you can use this command:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sudo mdutil -a -i off<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a few days you will notice that Spotlight actually is a useful companion on your Mac, and you will want to enable it again. So you will need this one too:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sudo mdutil -a -i on<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you forgot if you have Spotlight enabled or disabled, or just want to check its status for fun, you can try this command:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sudo mdutil -s \/<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Whats
Whats mds on mac?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Well, that\u2019s it, hope this helps to get your MDS process on Mac OSX <\/strong><\/em>under control, and enjoy your Mac and Spotlight<\/em> even more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are you using Mac OSX, and are you having trouble with a process MDS that’s using all your memory? What is MDS on Mac OSX? And how to fix it? Find out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[946],"tags":[1591,1590,969],"class_list":["post-2146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apple","tag-apple","tag-mac-2","tag-mac-osx"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Whats-mds-on-mac.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbkKxJ-yC","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2146"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14671,"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146\/revisions\/14671"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beheydt.be\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}