Death by mdimport

R.A. Hettinga (apparently) - 05:19am Dec 16, 2007 PST
via email

On Dec 15, 2007, at 6:46 AM, Matt Neuburg wrote:

> Spotlight indexing?

By the way, lately, on both my old dual g5 and the mostly-new MBP I'm
currently using, I've noticed a huge increase in spinning pizzas. I
got fed up one day, fired up Activity Monitor and noticed that
something called mdimport was using heaping piles of memory and
processor. Turns out that that's the process that spotlight uses to,
heh, import metadata.

I had noticed that EyeTV had, on installation, specifically excepted
itself from this scan in Spotlight's "privacy" page of its System
Preference pane, and, on a hunch, did the same for my folder with a
bunch of video content, .avi files, and the like.

mdimport stopped cold. I had my Mac back. No pizzas. And, watching in
X Resource Graph, memory and CPU usage went to the floor, and has
stayed there except when I'm actually working for a living.

Kewl.

There are side effects to this, of course, search inside those
folders is now useless, but, hey, you can sort it by name or
whatever, and pretend you're back on your old SE, or something...

Cheers,
RAH