If you don’t ever use the search feature or just don’t like it, you can also disable Spotlight and all of its indexing. But it also throws in a bunch of system process, some of which may not be safe to quit. Some apps are easy to spot, while others are system-level processes essential for running macOS. MacOS’s Activity Monitor will give you a list of all the apps you’re running, which is useful for closing down CPU-hungry processes. It displays a list of both open apps and system processes. The Activity Monitor Window of the application is the principal process monitor. If Spotlight isn’t working, you can check out these Spotlight troubleshooting tips which will get you situated again. Either of the following steps will open up Activity Monitor as shown below.

Just let the indexing complete, it generally takes between 15 and 45 minutes to complete. How long it takes to update the Spotlight index depends on a few variables, but mostly the size of your hard drive, the amount of data being indexed, major changes to the filesystem, and the time since last indexing. How long does mds & Spotlight take to finish indexing?

Usually you will see the mds process in conjunction with mdworker, which is another part of Spotlight and it’s indexing engine. You can then click on the Spotlight icon and you’ll see your main hard drive being indexed, with a progress bar and estimated time until completion: An easy way to identify that mds and Spotlight is indexing is to look at the Spotlight icon in the upper right corner of your menubar, when Spotlight is indexing the magnifying glass will have a dot in the center like so:

Macos process monitor