Proposal: XCTest Support for Swift Error Handling: mjtsai.com/blog/2016/01/1… #mjtsaiblog
PayPal’s Poor Security: mjtsai.com/blog/2016/01/1… #mjtsaiblog
The 15-Year History of iTunes: mjtsai.com/blog/2016/01/1… #mjtsaiblog
Office 2016, Sandboxing, and VBA Code: mjtsai.com/blog/2016/01/1… #mjtsaiblog
So far it looks like excluding the folders containing my PDF and Web archive files did prevent Spotlight from trying to index them.
@drdrang @danielpunkass Really depends on whether you have lots of files with text content or images/video/audio.
@smorr Yeah. Mail used to run non-full-text queries through SQLite but then switched to Spotlight for those, too. :(
@danielpunkass @siracusa Thanks. I’m used to OmniDiskSweeper, so for now now I’m using @hboon’s tip of running it with sudo.
I would disable Spotlight entirely except that Mail requires it. Maybe solution is to put Mail’s data on a separate volume.
@siracusa @danielpunkass That’s my worry, that excluding filters the search results rather than which files are indexed.
Turns out there are also cache files accumulating from the Web archive Spotlight importer.
@jsonbecker How did you prevent the same problem from happening again when Spotlight rebuilt its index?
@mcelhearn @danielpunkass Not sure why you don't get numbers for the "du" command. Here's what I see (after reset). pic.twitter.com/7K8HEDYVU9
@mpweiher To be more precise, those numbers were for folders. There were more actual text files inside them, of varying sizes.
@danielpunkass After deleting the cache, I still had 60 GB of index files. Not sure why. It’s usually more like 9 GB for the whole folder.
Tentative solution: exclude the folder with most of my PDFs from Spotlight and then reset it (sudo mdutil -E /).
@dafacto I don’t think so.
Based on the contents of the txt files in the Spotlight cache, I think they were left by /System/Library/Spotlight/PDF.mdimporter
@craigmorgan I’ve already reset Spotlight several times recently because it wasn’t finding things, so apparently the cache issue recurs. :(
The command I ended up using was "sudo du -mrd8 /.Spotlight-V100/|sort -n". After restart, still 60 GB of cache files, one that's 3.6 GB.
Just got the "Startup Disk Is Full" message, so back in a few after I restart.
Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions. Surprised at how many people have seen this problem with different causes.
Looks like the culprit is Spotlight. 2592 files in /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/6A539762-515B-41E7-80DC-AF1054850499/Cache/ up to 99 MB each.
@mattgemmell If it’s software update downloads, I can’t find where they’re going. Connected to TM destination and .MobileBackups is tiny.
@mcelhearn Virtual memory swap is only about 3 GB and shows up in OmniDiskSweeper.
@mpweiher Good to know. I don’t seem to have anything big in /var/db, though, according to "sudo du".
@craigmorgan I don’t see any errors in Xcode’s Preferences. Did that show up in Console? Files in regular temp folder?
Not sure where the space is being used. Quitting apps doesn’t help, but it comes back after I restart.
Recurring problem since 10.11: in the morning, I'm down to 1.5 GB of free disk space. Over 100 GB not accounted for by OmniDiskSweeper.