[Solved] – mds_stores Process Consuming High CPU Usage

[Solved] – mds_stores Process Consuming High CPU Usage

When it comes to providing the best technology and software, without any doubt, Apple Inc. is the best company in the world. Its products have been the best-selling and most used by people worldwide. Apart from iPhones and iOS, its Mac OS is one of the leading and most secure OS for the computing experience.

Compared to other operating systems, it is far more user-friendly and fast. Moreover, no other system can beat Mac OS in terms of security. However, everything is not perfect, and some issues are there with Mac OS also.

[Solved] – mds_stores Process Consuming High CPU Usage

Many issues or technical errors have occurred regarding the mds_stores consuming high CPU usage. This problem has existed in many recent Mac OS versions, including the latest Mojave update of 2019 and 2018.

What is mds_stores?

mds_stores is a process for Apple’s spotlight feature. Unfortunately, for users unaware of what a spotlight is, it is a type of search tool for your offline files, such as documents, pictures, songs, or any other such files. In short, it is a desktop search feature for Apple’s OSs.

Coming back to the mds_stores, “mds” stands for Metadata Server. Metadata means “data that provides information about other data.” Hence, mds_stores is a type of Mac OS’s Spotlight feature process.

What is the exact issue?

mds_stores process consuming high CPU usage in Mac is a well-known issue if you have been using Mac for a long time. When you feel that your Mac PC or Laptop is running slow or heating up or the fans in the machine are rotating at high speeds, you will probably head to the activity monitor to check what is happening.

For the people who don’t know about the activity monitor, it is simply a tool that shows all the current tasks running on your PC and how much memory they use.

Coming to the issue, when you head to this activity monitor, you will see that mds_stores is using a high percentage of CPU compared to other tasks. It usually uses up to 90-100 % of the CPU. Seeing this, many people get shocked and panic, thinking something is wrong with their PCs.

It is nothing to worry about and can be fixed easily. Here, we will see the best ways to resolve this issue.

1 – Restart the PC.

It may sound vague, but simply restarting your PC is one of the easiest and most effective ways to solve this issue. In some cases, many processes are running, including active changing of directories and folders in your PC.

So, simply restarting should probably resolve your issue. It works in 50 % of the cases, and if it does not work, you don’t need to worry; you also have other options.

2 – Removing some directories from indexing.  

This might sound a bit complicated but trust me; it is not. You can use the “rm” command.

First of all, you need to go to the terminal. You can head there by simply going to Applications/Utilities. Then, you should delete the spotlight’s database. You can do that by copying this command in the command prompt.

sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*

Then, you need to restart it and let the re-indexing happen. Depending on the type and number of tasks running, it may take a long time. You should not panic if it takes even several hours. So sit back and relax, as it is an essential step.

Then, you need to remove the directories that frequently change the content from Spotlight’s indexing. This is the most crucial step, and thus, it should be done very carefully. First, go to system preferences, then click on the Privacy tab, and then drag and drop the directories that you want to remove

After that, restart your PC, and your job is done.

3 – Disabling Spotlight

This is again a significant step to stop the mds_stores as mds_stores is a process of Spotlight indexing. If you are running the latest version of Mac OS i.e., Mac OS Mojave, you will find this process a bit complicated and need patience.

First, you need to understand that there is no option of turning OFF or turning ON the spotlight in system preferences. On other Mac OS versions, it is simpler than that on Mojave.

Coming to the procedure in the Mojave version, you must first check the SIP state. To do that, you need to run the terminal application. Then, type the command (csrutil status) and hit the return key. The state will be either “enabled” or “disabled.” If the SIP is disabled, you should not do anything; if it is enabled, you should perform the following steps.

First of all, Restart your Mac

After that, boot into recovery mode. You can do that by holding command+R on your keyboard when your PC initiates booting. Hold those keys until you see the Apple logo or a revolving globe. Then, you can release the keys. After that, you will see a utility window.

In the Utility Window, click on the utility menu and choose the terminal option. Doing this will open a terminal window.

After that, type “csrutil disable” and press enter. Then, restart your Mac.

Then comes the most crucial step. After the PC is restarted, run the terminal application and type the command – [sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist], hit the return key, and enter the password.

Your job is done.

Disabling the spotlight becomes easy if you are not on the Mac OS Mojave system.

First, go to the terminal from Applications/Utilities and type or copy the following command – “sudo mdutil -a -i off”

Then, restart your PC, and the spotlight will be disabled.