Excessive CPU use by mds_stores is a common cause of sluggish performance. Explains what it does and what you can do bring it under control.
Spotlight
Some suspect Apple of scanning images stored on your Mac. What evidence is there that could be happening?
What are the penalties in staying with Monterey, if you choose not to upgrade to Ventura, or your Mac isn’t supported? Please report serious bugs we should know about.
It has its own folder in ~/Library, and no less than 7 of its own Private Frameworks. But what is it, and what does it do? This is as much as I know about it.
By any measure, Monterey’s 12.3 update is very substantial, introducing major new features like Universal Control and Spatial […]
What are all those files and folders doing inside an app? Which can you safely change to customise an app? Why all the helpers?
Which of the cluster of hidden files and folders at the top level of an APFS volume should be preserved or copied to a copy of that volume?
Is Monterey burning your memory away? Here are two reproducible memory leaks which could explain that, plus two more than might.
Don’t use Unicode normalised Form C names for volumes in Disk Utility, as they cause havoc, and prevent Spotlight from indexing volumes.
Big Sur 11.3 fixed a bug which stopped indexing of the contents of RTF files. Here’s how to ensure all your RTFs are now accessible in Spotlight searches.