About a week ago I stumbled upon a problem on my MacBook. The ATSServer process was eating my processor capacity and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t stop. It was really strange since I wasn’t doing anything at that moment, and even after rebooting (sorry, still some Windows habits) it started processing again. I started searching on google if other people had the same problem. First I got a search result from someone who had that problem which had something to do with quicktime components, but after removing all components and rebooting multiple times, the problem was still there. The cause for the problem in my case was descibed on someone’s blog (sorry, don’t know which one it was anymore). Apparently ATSServer is (part of) the font server in Mac OS X, and with this person the process started processing when he copied a lot of PDF’s to his harddrive, which sounded very familiar, since I just unarchived 1100+ PDF’s. The conclusion was that it was spotlight indexing the PDF’s. Solution to this problem is to add the folder with PDF’s to the excludes for Spotlight, drawback of this solution is that your PDF’s are not indexed, and thus you cannot find them through spotlight. In my case, the PDF’s where a couple of e-books and since I didn’t care about spotlight for these files, I moved the PDF’s to an external disk which I already excluded from spotlight.
Jan 02
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 am
1100 PDFs shouldn’t take that long, right? Or does Spotlight index inside the PDFs too?
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:16 am
Yes, apparently it scans inside PDF’s so you can also search on the contents.
April 4th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Everytime i copied one single PDF file to my harddrive on my macbook the ATSServer process went crazy. The above did the trick – just sad that it is not possible to index the PDF files without the CPU going crazy,..
//kranko
June 20th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Another tip: goto Spotlight preferences, set the thing to re-index your entire machine, and then run it overnight.
Sometimes the Spotlight indexing mechanism gets borked and doing the re-indexing makes things run *much* better.
See the following for the procedure (pretty simple, although again it is CPU intensive for awhile).
http://www.macworld.com/article/44599/2005/05/reindexspot.html
September 8th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Thank you so much for this post. I thought there was something wrong with the hardware on my MacBook (it wouldn’t be the first time…) because for the past two days it has been overheating, leaving the fan on high constantly. My battery also had its capacity cut in half. But, thanks to this post, I found that it was the collection of PDF’s I recently obtained. After turning off the indexing for PDF’s, my fan slowed to normal speed.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Thanks a bunch! Problem solved!
October 27th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Hey, Thanks a lot! it explains everything
October 29th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Leopard 10.5.5 has been released. Now ATSServer & Spotlight indexing take 100% cpu and beach ball the mouse which made my system useless. The ATSServer problem has been going on for months and months now. Apple just doesn’t seem to care, or know how to fix it. I fixed my system. I wiped Leopard and put Tiger back on. Now I am happy again…. There are tons of horror stories on Apples support discussions about this. The plst removal fixes don’t seem to work.
November 5th, 2008 at 11:51 am
i have this problem too, just added 6gig of pdfs and the fan on my macbook is going ape. Just wondering will the problem sort itself if left alone to index the pdf’s?
November 5th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I don’t know if someone kept waiting for it to finish, but it might take some time. I know the 4gig of pdfs I copied wasn’t done processing after about 4 hours.
November 5th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
I see, what i’ve done is make the folder with the 6 of pdf’s private to spotlight and then copied 200 of then into another folder. All the fans have turn but hopfully it won’t take to long to complete. Do u know if there is way to monitor the progress of the idexing?
November 15th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Top post! I’ve been suffering from this problem for days after adding 3GB of PDFs to my MacBook. The fan was going crazy and the CPU usage was the same. Adding the folder with the PDFs in to the Spotlight privacy list made the whole things just calm down.
November 15th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
[...] big shout has to go out to Martijn Bleeker who highlighted this very issue on his blog yonks ago, and which I stumbled upon [...]
November 21st, 2008 at 9:40 pm
This post saved my sanity. Stupid spotlight should know not to try to index 350 full length books all in one processor bite.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
[...] extrem kurze Google-Suche später habe ich folgende Seite gefunden welche auf Spotlight und haufenweise PDF Dateien [...]
January 6th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
I had the exact same problem, googled “atsserver” and your post was the first hit. You advice solved the problem Many thanks!
January 20th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Thanks a lot you saved my Macbook
February 14th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
I’m surprised that everybody’s happy after having excluded their PDFs from Spotlight. I’m not, I do a lot of searches on PDFs, more than any other type of files.
Funny thing is that this ATSServer process goes completely nuts on my MacBook (just a few GB of PDFs) but not on my MacPro (almost 20GB PDFs – no problems), both having about the same specs and running the same Leopard version.
Did anyone wait for this process to finish? If so, how did it finish; did it finish because the machine burst into flames, or can I eventually end up with all my PDFs actually being indexed and searchable?
February 14th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I never said it was the ultimate solution, but since I don’t care about searching through PDFs it works for me. An alternative solution might be to copy a portion of the PDFs from the excluded directory into a non-excluded dir. And keep doing so until there are no PDFs left in the excluded directory.
Could take a while, but you might end up with all PDFs being indexed.
March 2nd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Thank you. It also worked for my MBP
May 1st, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Thank you, I had the same problem and this solved it.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Yes! This makes sense! For ages I’ve been perplexed about the connection between ATSserver going nuts and Transmission running. Never really thought about PDF-internal indexing until now. Thank you!
May 31st, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Inspired. I was freaking out that something was horribly wrong – I’d simply moved all my archived pdfs onto a folder on the desktop ready to backup to an external HD (once I’d formatted that..), BUT hadn’t got round to the backup yet and suffered two days of Macbook hell… Ultra hot, sluggish and power-draining, and no real idea why. Fired up activity monitor, found ATSServer, bashed that into Google and found your brilliant explanation. Did the backup, wiped the desktop folder, and lo and behold – I’ve got my Macbook back!
Useful to know that spotlight indexes pdf contents – I’m not sure I want it to, so might set it to exclude my ebook folder in future!
Cheers!!
June 8th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
I’ve tried the same thing…. but my CPU, and expecially the HD are making a lot of noises…. what should I do?
June 8th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Not sure, maybe some other filetype that spotlight wants to index including content ?
July 6th, 2009 at 5:52 am
Aye Bleeker, if you can patent this shit…cuz i’ve been going ape wall for the past day, thinking my mac was gonna blow up…u are the man!!!!
July 13th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
I added my Downloads folder to the “Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations:” under System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy.
It helped a lot. Seems Spotlight was working overtime to index and re-index a huge packet of PDF’s I was downloading.
July 31st, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Just let it finish. It takes hours and hours but after that spotlight is AWESOME!
August 22nd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Thank you a lot.
I noticed the same problem two days ago,after I have copied 4 folders (1GB) containing e-books from my external disk. What I did is isolating the three of them and letting spotlight index the 4th.Immediately cpu usage dropped from 100% to 70% and when this folder finished being indexed cpu usage dropped to normal again (around10%). I did the same for all 3 folders one by one and after 9 hours of indexing spotlight manged to finish and it seems really awesome.
My macbook pro was functioning properly even at 71C although I was holding the fire extinguisher during all this process :p:p
August 24th, 2009 at 3:31 am
I had this process running crazy when I tried to open a font in Font Book – Times Extra Bold. It took about 10 minutes for the install font window to show up, but before it did all I got was the spinning beachball. I checked the activity monitor, and this process was using most of my CPU while Font Book was beachballing. Macs and fonts are very unreliable. As a graphic designer of 5 years on both mac and pc platforms, I have had nothing but trouble with mac fonts and fontbook. I have never had a reputable TTF font not install on my PC.
September 1st, 2009 at 11:05 am
Thank you! you saved my lives…! i just got this problem yesterday after downloading gigs of e-books mostly pdf files. my exhaust fan keep noizingg,,then crasshes.. I was trying to figure out a long day, my case is so terrible since every restart my osx tiger frezzez in as little as 10 sec…
, (so annoying cause i must play ‘catch and restart’,) after trying many restarting I could make activity monitor on the dock, then make it open at login, then figure out my problems was caused by ATSserver, then force quit that process and at last found this very helpful information,
I almost cry cause many downloaded files havent complete yet if I just reinstall osx.. then at last come idea to cheating by opening activity monitor in 10 sec.
so I move all .pdf to spotlight privacy folder as you sugessted,. and I also managed to keep activity monitor always open at login in order to prevent osx from such problems.. thank you very much!!
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Hello Martijn, thanks for your article,
I’m wondering when Apple is going to fix this. Surely they can change it so the settings for Spotlight are more configurable, like only index when my Macbook is on a power outlet or start it manually. Or if it finds a big heap warn you.
Did anyone with Snow Leopard experience this problem already?
Spotlight can be really useful but it should work properly first.
September 20th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Hi Niels,
I wondered if the problem was still there with snow leopard too.
I tried copying the heap of PDFs that caused the problem today, and it looks like they are all indexed (a couple of hours later, I got interrupted, so I’m not sure if it caused an annoying peak in processor usage)
So it looks like this problem has been fixed in Snow Leopard, I tried searching for content in these PDFs and spotlight found them, so they are definitely indexed.
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:57 am
THANK YOU
same problem and it is now solved
October 9th, 2009 at 1:36 am
Thanks, I had this problem too. I’ve disabled Spotlight completely as I don’t use it (Quicksilver is much better). Poor folks who don’t venture into Terminal to find out what to Google for!
October 16th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Thanks ! Saved my day (and my battery).
November 4th, 2009 at 1:54 am
Thanks a bunch! I just came home from some errands and noticed my processor and temperature going hog-wild. Going to the Spotlight System Preference panel and deselecting PDFs took care of this instantly.
January 2nd, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Thank-you. I am an uptight #@!%$ when it comes to temps on my 3 yr old MBP… I had never encountered this before, the runaway (seems) process indexing pdfs. I had just unrared 25megs (megs, man, not gigs) and the bloody fans went ape, temp hit 165 and I was hesitant to reboot thinking that with no fans running on the reboot (incorrect) the machine would melt. I will disseminate this info to my MBP friends. Hope devs at Apple TAKE NOTE and mend this.