How can I quit frozen Spotlight without rebooting my computer?

Question

I opened up Spotlight, typed '12*' to do some multiplication and it's been frozen for the last 20 minutes.

I am looking for how to restart the program/service/whatever it technically is, but it's not in the Force Quit menu, so what is the quickest way to kill this process without restarting my computer? (I am on Mac OS X Snow Leopard)

Solution 1

Depending on your OS and luck, it could actually be 1 of at least a few [services]:

• mds
• SystemUIServer
• Spotlight

To me, a while back when they were called feline names, I've had the same issue (as I was saying on the comments) and it was not Spotlight: it was the Menubar. Just like with spotlight, we simply have to kill it so it will be restarted by launchd.

For that, use the Activity Monitor and search for your [service].

Or you may instead use the Terminal, for instance:

killall Spotlight

And if that doesn't work, consider using sudo.

Solution 2

Just ran into Spotlight itself crashing. The answer for that problem is just going to the Terminal and typing:

killall Spotlight

Fixed the Spotlight freeze problem!

Solution 3

The first post is correct that mds is the process for spotlight. You can kill it in activity monitor or:

sudo killall mds

from the terminal. The process will restart automatically as it is managed as a launchd item that is set to always be running.

You might look at

man mdutil

as well. This is a utility at the command line for managing mds settings on volumes.

Solution 4

I'm not sure why this wasn't mentioned on here, but I had a locked up Spotlight menu/search box was able to solve the problem by killing the Spotlight process using the Activity monitor. None of the other actions mentioned in other answers worked.

This was on OS X El Capitan.

Solution 5

It'll probably show up in /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app. Select All Processes in the toolbar to see processes of all users.

---

The screenshot is from when I was searching something. I guess you'd kill mds by pressing Cmd-Opt-Q after selecting it to terminate Spotlight, but I'm not sure -- probably best if you checked CPU usage and/or if the name of a process is written in red, indicating it froze.

View more solutions

Comments

[cregox]

Damon, why you accepted an answer that didn't work for you? I for one just got the exact same issue for the first time, tried the exact same measures, including from your comments below, and then tried every suggestion in the answers but still got nothing. It's still frozen there. Did you ever solve this without a reboot? :P

[cregox]

the terminal junk is the same as the activity monitor junk, just like Wilersh said himself. and yep, no dices there. Spotlight is now behaving weird and I do think it triggered the issue but now I know it is actually the task/notification bar that's locked. My clock has stopped and the colorful hourglass is all over every regular mac icon there.

[Damon]

odd.. as soon as I force-quite it, it appears back there and my spotlight menu is still up working away at nothing.

[HikeMike]

@Damon It's a server intended to run all the time, and gets restarted once you stop it. If it were responsible for the issue, killing it would fix it. Have you tried looking for another task, that maybe uses much CPU, or maybe tried to simply restart Finder?

[Damon]

restarting finder was the first thing i did.. nothing else really doing much other than Window Server.. looks like i'm just going to have to reboot

[Damon]

I seem to recall the clock stopped changing for me as well.. though can't be certain.. it was 3 months ago after all hehe

[mpe]

I had the same problem, and ended up restarting.. The entire notification area was frozen, so the answer may have been to restart/kill that process.

[iwein]

I tried this solution and it worked (I did it from the Activity Monitor, but that's close enough)

[lindon fox]

@Damon - I can confirm that the clock stopped changing for me.

[cregox]

Apple + Option + Esc is also a great advice... I hope I recall that the next time spotlight seem to freeze. Which trouble app did you happen to kill in your case?

[Jonny]

Did not work for me. Spotlight icon only is still unresponsive.

[Jonny]

Killing mds does not work for me either.

[cregox]

@Jonny there are two newer answers that might resolve it for you. Maybe it's the SystemUIServer or, in case you you can't find what might be blocking it, you can at least try logging off and back before rebooting.

[Thilak Rao]

Killing SystemUIServer did the trick for me. I'm on Yosemite Public Beta 2.

[cregox]

Dammit, in my latest comment I meant Quick Look UI Helper. :P

[Jens Timmerman]

It goes away and the process returns, but the spotlight icon is gone, and the keyboard shortcut doesn't work.

[justinpage]

Running killall SystemUIServer on terminal fixed frozen spotlight issue on Yosemite. Everything immediately restarted.

[cregox]

@KLVTZ I hope by everything you mean the Menubar! :o

[justinpage]

@Cawas my bad, yep menu bar and everything within it restarted! Not the entire computer >>

[Bombe]

This also restored my ability to use Spotlight to start applications on 10.9, and search in Mail works again, too. Thanks!

[Aristides]

alternatively ps -e | grep "Spotlight" then kill {process id for spotlight}

[Jenny]

killall Spotlight did the the trick for me (on OS X El Capitan).

[JobHunter69]

This worked for me. killall systemui didn't work

[Ryan]

Also worked for me while the approved answer didn't. My symptom was not being able to type into spotlight (launched fine, just did nothing when launched)

[Nick]

Worked for me on macOS Sierra. I believe the accepted answer is from a time when Spotlight was in the menu bar.

[Drew Goodwin]

Spotlight would open but not accept any input, this fixed it for me on macOS Sierra.

[Jeremiah]

This doesn't work in Mac OS Sierra. See answer by tomng below.

[cregox]

look at the dates. El Captain wasn't even in the planning board back then.

[rinogo]

killall Spotlight worked for me on macOS Sierra!

[trinth]

pkill Spotlight did the trick for me. Didn't need the other 2.

[Admin]

Can concur this works. Probably the only solution that works for Catalina and above.