Does your M1’s CPU e-cores look like this? MDS, the metadata server may be to blame.

Written By Steve Steele

Does the CPU Usage window in Activity Monitor on your M1 Mac look like this?


It could be the MDS, metadata server, that serves all clients of the metadata APIs, including Spotlight hogging the CPU’s e-cores.

if you have spinning hard drives mounted on your desktop, metadata server might be working harder than you would like, causing the hard drives to make grumbling noises and using cycles on your M1’s e-cores.

Solution? Turn it off.

  1. Open Terminal (in your Utilities folder).

  2. Enter the command “sudo mdutil -a -I off”. Type your password. (see image 1)

  3. The output will tell you that index searching has been turned off for all volumes. (see image 2)

Image 1

Image 2

The gurgling sounds coming from your drives should stop, and your CPU Usage window should look like this…

If you want to turn Spotlight indexing back on, just enter the same command as in step 2, but type “on” instead of “off”, like this “sudo mdutil -a -I on”

Steve Steele