{"id":36533,"date":"2022-07-18T15:01:53","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T19:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=36533"},"modified":"2022-07-18T15:01:53","modified_gmt":"2022-07-18T19:01:53","slug":"invasive-spotlight-indexing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/18\/invasive-spotlight-indexing\/","title":{"rendered":"Invasive Spotlight Indexing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lloyd Chambers<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The thoughtless design of providing no facility to defer\/delay Spotlight indexing is bad enough. But to perform intensive Spotlight indexing when the user is needs the machine to perform well—that is design incompetence to the point of offensive. Ditto for when a CPU and disk-intensive program is running, one that the user wants done as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

Spotlight destabilizes the performance of your Mac. You just never know when you can count on things running as they should.<\/p>\n

What I’m asking Apple to do is to add something akin to the “Stop this backup” menu item that Time Machine offers. That works great—it will defer the backup for an hour. A “Defer indexing For...” menu command would surprise and delight me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s great to have tools like TimeMachineEditor<\/a>, but in my opinion there should be a built-in way to restrict both Time Machine and Spotlight to only run during certain hours and to postpone them for a specified amount of time.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I want the Mac to be quiet, but I don’t want to turn it off because it’s still doing something important like uploading to a cloud backup. That by itself wouldn’t cause fan noise or much hard drive grinding. But sometimes a Spotlight process decides to go crazy, and then the Mac is loud for hours or even days unless I’m in a position where I can unmount the drive that it happens to be indexing.<\/p>\n

I’ve mostly worked around this by disabling Spotlight indexing on all my spinning hard drives. However, it no longer (since APFS?) seems to be possible to exclude Time Machine drives. And, of course, my Time Machine drive has more indexable content than any single drive that I have, so there is a lot of work for Spotlight to do.<\/p>\n

As best I can tell, the most invasive indexing is actually caused by something going wrong with the index files. Sampling the processes shows threads like com.apple.metadata.spotlightindex.Compaction<\/tt> that seemingly use lots of CPU and I\/O forever. In such cases, I use sudo mdutil -E<\/code> to delete the Spotlight index. That, of course, triggers many hours of legitimate work for Spotlight to build a new index, but then it’s eventually quiet—until the next time compaction gets stuck.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lloyd Chambers: The thoughtless design of providing no facility to defer\/delay Spotlight indexing is bad enough. But to perform intensive Spotlight indexing when the user is needs the machine to perform well—that is design incompetence to the point of offensive. Ditto for when a CPU and disk-intensive program is running, one that the user wants […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2022-07-18T19:01:57Z","apple_news_api_id":"f1d74084-1c3c-4387-b39e-1a60fbc93b9c","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2022-07-18T19:01:57Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A8ddAhBw8Q4eznhpg-8k7nA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[30,2077,1042,216],"class_list":["post-36533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-mac","tag-macos-12","tag-spotlight","tag-timemachine"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36534,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36533\/revisions\/36534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}