Fix Spotlight indexing slowdowns
Q Monterey often slows my Mac mini to a crawl. When I look in Activity Monitor mds_stores is hogging the CPU. How can I stop this?
A mds_stores is 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 disks, even those used to store Time Machine backups. Leave your Mac running for a good five minutes, then check in Activity Monitor whether mds_stores is high in CPU again.
If it is, force it to reindex the Data volume by opening System Settings > Siri & Spotlight and clicking the Spotlight Privacy button. Click the ‘+’ button at the foot, select the Macintosh HD drive, add it to that list and click Done. Wait a minute or so to let that take effect, then open that list, select that disk and remove it with the ‘–’ button.
Reindexing large volumes can take several hours before its processes become inactive again. When that’s complete, connect an external drive and repeat those steps for that drive. Time Machine backups to APFS volumes are a particular problem here, and upgrading to Ventura is the best solution for them.