mdimport : What is it? |
 |
| by Oscar Sodani | |
| October 23, 2006 | |
 Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell. When running top or another system activity monitor on your Mac with OS X, you may notice a process called mdimport which is taking up a lot of resources. What does it do? mdimport is a crucial process for Spotlight, the OS X file indexing engine. It is short for "metadata datastore import", and whenever you create or copy new files to your Mac, this process kicks off. It imports file data into a database so that Spotlight can find the correct file when you perform a search. From a Terminal command line, run "man mdimport" and all of the ways you can run mdimport will be displayed. When you see mdimport, you are also likely to see LAServer running as well. Have a question? Need help? Get free, friendly person-to-person help with your computer questions or spyware questions in our help forums! |
