Why is Spotlight using 98% of my MacBook Air CPU?

UPDATED: August 19, 2008 7:42pm

Problem solved. It was a hanging process that got triggered when I installed a new VPN client. The weird thing was it could only be killed via the command line and didn't show up in the Activity Monitor

Why is Spotlight using 98% of my CPU?

(Credit: Dave's failing MacBook Air)

This MacBook Air goes from decent, to bad, to terrible, back to decent and now into the ridiculous.

Even when running zero applications there are pieces of Apple software that are doing very strange things. The latest issue is that Spotlight is somehow using 98% of my CPU horsepower and the total percentage used is 114.4% which really shouldn't be possible.

Any of you Mac guys out there have any ideas? I killed my replacement Thinkpad battery by accident when I didn't put it into suspend or hibernate.

[ten90jwhite]

check out this article: http://www.absorbeo.net/2008/01/05/leopard-and-spotlight-indexing/

[dsirkka]

Hmm. It would seem to me that you are interpreting the screen incorrectly. It seems your using 68% of your CPU and that of that 68%, Spotlight is using 98%. Which would make sense if it was indexing your files.

[DarkHawke]

I don't use Macs, but just from your screenshot there, it looks like your CPU is only running at 58% of capacity (adding the User and System percentages, or subtracting the Idle percentage from 100; BTW, WTH is "Nice"?) The stats below the graph are the percentages of that 58% CPU usage consumed by the listed apps. That don't explain why Spotlight is using 57% of your CPU to do its indexing, but at least it's not overloading your computer! ;) And have you taken a look at this chart when you're running an app, or actively doing something on your Mac? I would think Spotlight would quiet down in that situation and wait for an idle period to do indexing.

[sberacha]

Dear Friend The reading is clear, you are just using a 44% of your CPU resources, I think you should Notice the readings at the top of the screenshot to understand that the CPU is not being overwelmed by only one aplication, since 42% is in idle.
Pretty much that 98% that you notice on Spotlight, it can be also the status of the application, meaning that is close to finish indexing, or also saving. I think if you wait some time the process will finish and also your cpu resources wil go down to 10% or minimal expression.

[daverosenberg]

Yes, you guys are right. It's 98% of 68%

[kelmon]

Spotlight will be quite intensive when it is indexing a drive for the first time or your Spotlight index has been reset so that it's doing it again. However, during normal use Spotlight should consume no processor time except when you are actively using it or a file has been created/updated (mine currently shows CPU usage of 0.0%). All I can think of is that Spotlight has a corrupted index or some such problem, so reseting the Spotlight index may sort the problem out. Try the following command at the Terminal:

sudo mdutil -E /

That will cause Spotlight to delete its existing index for your startup disk and start again. It will take a while for the index to be created but after that the Spotlight process should not consume any CPU resources.