A Dim View of Spotlight
Rob Griffiths (via Pierre Igot):
Once Tiger hit the streets, however, I was less than impressed with the real-world usability of Spotlight, as I discussed in this entry on my personal blog. When I wrote that entry back in May, I focused a fair bit on the interface and the performance. Now that I’ve had several months to adjust to using Spotlight, I’m ready to follow-up with some additional observations gained over the last six months, and some recommendations on what I’d love to see in “version 2.0” of Spotlight. But before that, let’s revisit a few of my first impressions of Tiger’s search technology.
I like the idea of Spotlight, but I’ve turned it off. Trying to search with it would lock up the Finder or the Spotlight menu for minutes at a time, and it would rarely find what I was looking for, anyway. I’ve seen it work well on Macs with a small number of files, but on my main Mac (a dual 2 GHz G5 with 2.5 GB of RAM but lots of files) it’s worse than useless because it slows everything down. Fortunately, Path Finder has a good file search feature.
5 Comments
I'd suggest trying it again on 10.4.3, or perhaps deleting your indexes and letting Spotlight reindex your system. Spotlight works very well for me on a system much slower than yours with hundreds of thousands of files.
Jan: Yes, I'm a tester for Path Finder 4, which is a major update that will be out soon.
Eric: I tried the re-indexing thing several times with previous versions. I'll give it a fresh try on 10.4.3.
I just saw the announcement on their web site ... makes everything much more interesting.
My fresh Spotlight indexing with 10.4.3 started Thursday morning and concluded Saturday morning.
Good News: Now it's working much better than before; most searches take just a few seconds. Searches in the Finder are faster than in Path Finder.
Bad News: The indexer crashed half a dozen times, and it never reported an estimate of the time remaining. The fifth search that I tried should have found a file, but didn't. After returning "No Results Found," it locked up the Spotlight menu. SystemUIServer gobbled hundreds of MB of RAM, and I would have restarted except that I was in the middle of burning a DVD. After about ten minutes, the menu unfroze and displayed the proper list of matching files.
Stay up-to-date by subscribing to the Comments RSS Feed for this post.
Couldn't agree more, Spotlight in it's current implementation isn't useful at all ... the only reason why I have it enabled is the file search feature. Which brings me to my next question: I was actually looking a Path Finder earlier today (for a completely different reason), I noticed that version 4 was announced over a year ago and not much seems to have happened the last six months. Is this product still alive?