macOS
Shine a spotlight on the solutions to your most irritating Mac problems
Fix Spotlight indexing slowdowns
Q
Montereyoften slows my Mac mini to a crawl. When I look in Activity Monitor mds_stores is hogging the CPU. How can I stop this?
by PAUL TILBURY
A mds_storesis a common cause of poor performance. It’s a background service that maintains Spotlight’s hidden metadata indexes on each volume. Although some recommend killing the process, as it’s an essential service macOS restarts it, and problems can come back later.
One quick and simple panacea is to start your Mac up in Safe mode, with the Shift key held on Intel models, or via Recovery on Apple silicon. Leave it five minutes or so, then restart it in regular mode. If that doesn’t fix it, shut your Mac down and disconnect all external