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?
Technorati Tags: macos x
6 comments:
Google search slows windows down terribly too. Not only that but it doesn't search every file and it certainly doesn't catalog metadata.
I guess you can't have it both ways.
See also: http://jwz.livejournal.com/618656.html
JWZ has some other insights into Spotlight.
I use MSN Desktop search in Windows. I've neer noticed any slow down and the interface seems nicer than the few times I've used Google.
I don't seem to have such problems with Spotlight.... according to Activity Monitor, mdimport is consistently at 0.00% CPU usage and I haven't noticed any 5 second lockups.
I'm with Khalid. I have an iMac and only have troubles with spotlight on my external USB hard drive. I turned off caching for that drive and everything's fine now.
Just get the free EasyFind here :
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/
You'll never need anything else ;)
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