Observing what Spotlight's mdworker is indexing for diagnostic purposes
I’m not sure whether there’s a more detailed log generated by mdworker
or mds
themselves. You could use fs_usage
to see what files they are reading though, run the following in Terminal:
sudo fs_usage mdworker mds
As it says in the man
page: “The fs_usage
utility presents an ongoing display of system call usage information pertaining to filesystem activity. It requires root privileges due to the kernel tracing facility it uses to operate. By default, the activity monitored includes all system processes except […]. These defaults can be overridden such that output is limited to include or exclude a list of processes specified by the user.”
Here’s a short sample of the output you'll get (I ran this in a narrow window, use a wider one to get the file paths in more detail):
11:07:49 fsgetpath resourceLog.plist 0.000029 mds
11:07:49 getattrlist resourceLog.plist 0.000089 mds
11:07:49 listxattr resourceLog.plist 0.000042 mds
11:07:49 getattrlist resourceLog.plist 0.000164 mds
11:07:49 getattrlist resourceLog.plist 0.000029 mds
11:07:54 exit 0.000118 mdworker
The exit
calls correspond to the messages “Service exited due to signal” in the “system.log”:
Aug 8 11:07:54 […] com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.single.[…]):
Service exited due to signal: Killed: 9 sent by mds[114]
For some more information on fs_usage
, there’s an (old) article on ‘macobserver.com’ titled “Mac OS X: Using fs_usage as a Troubleshooting Tool”.