mds, mds_stores, and lsd taking up WAY too much memory

[PeterB]

Sarcany wrote:
Could try completely clearing the Spotlight indexes.

Mojave is the last OS you can really do it on.

In the Terminal...

sudo mdutil -a -i off
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100

Reboot your Mac, then run...

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Give it a few hours to rebuild indexes. Maybe overnight.

Do some searches to confirm that Spotlight is working.

And then check the Memory and CPU usage again.

I can't get past your second command (sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100) ... it gives me an "operation not permitted" error.

Edit: but if the purpose of the second command is to delete the Spotlight index, I'm using Onyx now to cause it to rebuild the index... we'll see if that works.