Constantly indexing?

[Scrappycrafty]

My mac is driving me nuts! I thought it was constantly indexing the spotlight. So I used the terminal to turn it off and then back on again so it would restart it. No difference. I then brought up my activity monitor and did a search for mdworker. It only found one. So that is not what is causing my mac to constantly run and churn in the background. It slows it down badly. I then used activity monitor to see what is hogging memory but that is only the kernal_task. Which is the computer itself. I am tired of this! Help!
I reboot the darn thing and you can hear it churning away even before i type in my password to open it up.
If it helps i am running high sierra with the latest version. And have 4gb of memory. It is constantly churning/running in the background. I can not seem to get it to go “quiet”. It is really slow. I know more memory would help but in the meantime I want it to stop!!!!
Michelle

 

[jpn]

hi

sounds like its not a lot of fun.

when you say "index", you mean the kind of indexing that you can get Spotlight to do a re-index using the Spotlight system preference i assume.

if so, during this "indexing", when you hit Command + Space Bar, and the floating Spotlight window appears, do you see at the top of a blue progress bar to indicate index progress?

i dont know what machine you have, but with my 512GB SSD 2018 MacBook Air with 16GB Memory, with about 50% of the disk being full, it takes about 30 minutes to do a complete re-index. during that time, my machine is sometimes choppy, but not so much that i can't work on it. the new Air has a fan, and the fan can come on at times as well during this process.

i have found that during re-indexing its best i just go make a sandwich or do laundry instead of trying to work on the machine. especially with anything to do with Mail, or, anything that is involved with copying or transferring files to/from anywhere like to a USB.

 

[MarkC426]

It sounds like your mac is using virtual memory from the hard disk, hence the noise.
4gb is not much ram to run HS.
What does activity monitor show for ram usage?