Why Does OS X Mavericks Start Indexing After A Crash? My macbook pro (mid-2010 running 10.9.5) has been crashing a lot lately.  I haven't made any changes to it (either hardware or software) or installed anything new but it seems to be something to do with a kernel process "mdworker".

After each crash and when I log in again spotlight starts indexing immediately.  This further causes temperatures to rise about 90 degrees and usually the macbook pro will then go into a cycle of crashes.

It seems to be all due to spotlight indexing.

Why?
While reading up on this, I found two prevalent suggestions. One from this Ask Different thread:


  Try to erase the Spotlight index by either running sudo mdutil -Ea or by temporarily adding your startup disk to the privacy tab in the Spotlight preference pane.
  
  If that doesn't work, try to run:
  
  sudo lsof|grep mdworker
  
  or
  
  sudo mdutil -Ea;opensnoop -n mdworker
  
  to see if the indexing hangs on some specific files.


And the second, which I actually feel is more relevant to your case since your machine does finish indexing, suggested this:


  After trying everything under the sun, here's what fixed it for me
  
  Booted in Safe Mode and ran the free utility OnyX. 
  
  Cleaned system caches, repaired/restored permissions.