Having trouble with your system Bogging down? Take a look in the Activity Monitor and check the CPU load for MDS and/or MDWORKER.

Are they consuming a large portion of your CPU?

If so, here’s some hints on how to debug this situation….

If you use this unix command

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker | egrep “open”

Alternatively, this command which will show all open files from the MDS process, might help as well.

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mds | egrep “open”

You will see every file that mdworker is opening. This will allow you to see what files maybe handing up MDS / MDWORKER….

Once you have an idea on what files could be causing an issue, exclude using the Spotlight Privacy Pane. This allows you to eliminate them without having to delete the file(s) at this time….

But keep in mind, this issues may not be a spotlight issue, it could be a Time Machine issue. There are situations where Time Machine takes a long time to index, and can cause a situation where Spotlight revisits the same files…