mdworker

Spotlight plug-ins may cause high CPU usage by 'mdworker'

One issue that people may experience in OS X is when the process "mdworker" takes up an inordinate amount of CPU resources and results in a slow and laggy computer. The mdworker process is a file-indexing tool that is invoked either when drives are mounted or when files on locally mounted drives are altered. The resulting index is then used by Spotlight and other searching utilities to quickly reveal files instead of having to scan file-by-file, which can take an exceptionally long time, especially as people increasingly use larger hard-drive and filesystem capacities.

Being invoked by filesystem changes, … Read more