So after running:
# mdutil -E /and turning Spotlight back on, I'm no longer seeing the performance problems I had. All thanks to the comments. And I didn't think anybody read this blog :)
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Spotlight (part deux)
After reading some comments about how Spotlight just works for other people, and talking with some friends that have Spotlight turned on, I started doubting that it was so bad. It turns out that when I got the MacBook Pro, I transfered about 40 GB of stuff from my old laptop, and apparently it also transfered a corrupt Spotlight Index.
So after running:
So after running:
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Spotlight must die (or get its act straight)
I just got a new MacBook Pro, and had it for about a week. What I discovered was that the machine wasn't as snappy as I thought it would be. It's a CORE DUO for Christ's sake, it has not one, but TWO cores, it has 2 GB of freaking RAM! It should be the fastest box around! But no, it's slow and every once in a while it just locks up for about 5 seconds.
After some fun with fs_usage trying to figure out what was going on, I found the culprit: Spotlight. See, spotlight interacts VERY VERY badly with the file system cache, and since Mac OS X has a unified cache, with the VM cache. This means that while the OS is trying really hard to keep your working set in memory, spotlight (a.k.a. mdimport) is indexing stuff and therefore causing unnecessary flushes of the cache.
The solution? Turn it off. Just run 'mdutil -i off /' and edit /etc/hostconfig to set "SPOTLIGHT=-NO-" and be done with it. Or if you don't want to even type that, get Spotless and click away. Go ahead, I'll wait.
The problems? Mail no longer searches, and no easy and quick way to launch applications. I installed QuickSilver for the application launching part, and will figure out if I can find an alternative for searching mail. But it's worth it.
My machine is SUPER FAST now, and the disk is quiet all the time. Processors are mostly idle if I'm not doing anything, ah the sound of a high performance machine...
How badly does Google Desktop Search hinder performance under Windows?
After some fun with fs_usage trying to figure out what was going on, I found the culprit: Spotlight. See, spotlight interacts VERY VERY badly with the file system cache, and since Mac OS X has a unified cache, with the VM cache. This means that while the OS is trying really hard to keep your working set in memory, spotlight (a.k.a. mdimport) is indexing stuff and therefore causing unnecessary flushes of the cache.
The solution? Turn it off. Just run 'mdutil -i off /' and edit /etc/hostconfig to set "SPOTLIGHT=-NO-" and be done with it. Or if you don't want to even type that, get Spotless and click away. Go ahead, I'll wait.
The problems? Mail no longer searches, and no easy and quick way to launch applications. I installed QuickSilver for the application launching part, and will figure out if I can find an alternative for searching mail. But it's worth it.
My machine is SUPER FAST now, and the disk is quiet all the time. Processors are mostly idle if I'm not doing anything, ah the sound of a high performance machine...
How badly does Google Desktop Search hinder performance under Windows?
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