When running top or another system activity monitor on your Mac with OS X, you may notice a process called LAServer which is taking up a lot of resources. What is it?

LAServer is a crucial process for Spotlight, the OS X file indexing engine. It is short for "Language Analysis Server", and whenever you create or copy new files to your Mac, this process kicks off. It analyzes the files so that Spotlight can find them when you search.

When you see LAServer, you are also likely to see mdimport running as well.