macbook running 10.5 that has been running warm, sometimes hot, to the touch starting 2 or 3 weeks back. today looking through the activity monitor i see an admin process "mds" that is running at near 100%(?) so i shut it down to see what happens. it starts right back and slowly ramps back up to 100 BUT my fan turns off for the first time in 2 or 3 weeks. does anyone know what this process is? right now activity monitor is locked up and i can't get a force quit going. obviously something is wrong here. any help is appreciated.
Read over these links. Maybe one will help you out. Looks like you're not alone in this problem. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=macs,+admin+process+"mds"&btnG=Google+Search x
zenloki, I am training for Unix/Linux system administration. Try this. Open a Terminal window; click on a blank part of desktop, then the top bar, Go >> Applications >> Utilities >> Terminal. In the terminal window, type the command top. Top is a command line utility that displays running processes. Look through the processes for your rambo CPU hogger. When you see it, press k (k = kill). Then top will ask for the PID (Process ID). Type in the number related to the process you want to kill. It should be displayed in top. Next, top will ask what signal to kill the process with. Use a signal 9. This brings the rambo process to a dead stop. Applications Utilities Terminal > top (command line utility) >> k (press k to have top kill the process) >> (PID like a 4 or 5 digit number) >> 9 (signal to kill with) -- -- -- -- -- If you still have problems... Go into the System Preferences and click Accounts. In the bottom left of that window you will see a + and - icon set. Click on the + and add a new user. Also, turn off the auto-login feature on system reboot. Take all your file (music, pictures, video, documents, etc) and drop them into the public folder. This allows any user on the computer to access them. Now use the newly created account. Copy all your files from the public folder into your new account.
i opened the terminal, ran top and can see some of the 70 processes either asleep (66), running (3) and stuck (1). i've punched a bunch of keys and combos but can't for the life of me scroll down to the end of this file. i read that page up and page down should do it but there are no keys like that here. right now i'm feeling like a fresh green noob. anyone have any ideas on such a seemingly simple problem. anyway my guess is that the stuck process is the problem.
page up is the same as apple uparrow or apple downarrow is page down. also, i believe MDS is a service that allows you to share files with PCs. I think if you go into system prefs. and then click the sharing folder, you should be able to turn off personal file sharing, or at least uncheck the box that says "windows sharing" that might work i'm still on 10.4 so if thhey changed the system prefs in 10.5 i'm sorry, but that same MDS thing has occured on my laptop a while back
I read somewhere that MDS is a file indexing service. It will hog resources every once in a while and eventually finish it's job. Indexing makes the system faster by marking the files and folders for future referencing. It will take a while for mds to finish, but after it is finished, the computer will be faster. Just open your laptop and let it run overnight a few times. Make sure the power cord is plugged in and the settings don't let it turn off after being idle. That should allow mds to finish it's thing, eventually.
thanks to all for the valuable insight. temporarily i set all drives to private so they're no longer searched, rebooted and this 'fixed' the problem. of course spotlight is useless now. i went by the mac store and had one of their techs look it over and he couldn't find a fix for it either. when the tech turned off the spotlight privacy settings and rebooted, we watched mds start up, do the indexing (>100%) then idle back (1-2%) and that took all of a couple minutes. then for some reason it spiked up to 117% and stayed there. very perplexing. file sharing is now off, as is the ability to index and there is some difference. the very strange thing is that this morning i used it for an hour or so and everything was back to normal. so the problem is perhaps intermittent too. i'm going to keep plugging away at this. thanks again for the assistance!
it's fixed. after one or two more reboots the whole mds problem reared again and has steadily run at 100%+. not really knowing what else to do i reinstalled the OS and for the last 24 hours everything is working as it should. thanks again for all the suggestions.
