OS X :: Spotlight Slow - How To Rebuilt Index
Dec 1, 2010
I am still fairly new to the Mac, had mine just over a month now. What has struck me is how slow spotlight is. I come from Windows 7, which has a fantastic instant search. I am not sure if my expectations of spotlight are off or if I have some issue I am unfamiliar with. I've researched this quite a bit. There do seem to be random complaints about spotlight. Usually people recommend getting more ram, rebuilding the index, or repairing permissions. I have tried repairing permissions, that is about it. I am not sure how the index is rebuilt, or I would be willing to try that.
What seems to happen is sometimes I just do not get the results I want. I will type in a query, and wait for 10 - 20 seconds for the document I want to show up. It usually never does. If I delete the query, then try again immediately afterwards, the document I want shows up. Is this behavior expected? This is snow leopard fully updated on a Macbook Pro 2.53Ghz i5 and 4GB Ram with the 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive. While the query is running, I have Word, Outlook, Safari, and sometimes Xcode and the terminal open. Should I just leave it be, that is how it is, deal with it? Or is rebuilding the index something I have to do regularly, or maybe some other voodoo magic trick?
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Mar 16, 2009
I have gone to the "Private" tab under Spotlight preferences and dragged in my hard drive. The green "plus" sign lights up, but once I let go nothing ever gets added to the list. I've tried it with everything and nothing gets added.
I've gone to Terminal and typed "sudo mdutil -E /" plus my password. It returns: "Error, no index found for volume."
I've tried "sudo open /.Spotlight-V100" and it says the folder cannot be opened because I do not have sufficient access privileges. Does anyone know where to find this folder on my hard drive so I can get to it manually? I am hoping it might ask for my password once I'm there. As the administrator, does anyone know how to make the OS know that I do have sufficient privileges?
The things I have not done are use disk repair because I do not have a boot disk. I have not reinstalled because the OS came on my computer and I have no disks. I would think re-installing would do the trick, but there has to be something else going on that can be tweeked, wouldn't you think?
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Oct 13, 2009
I noticed that even while browsing the spotlight service continuosly index something.
Is it trying to index even the browser cache?
Shouldn't it start indexing only if I download something or create/modify some document?
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Sep 4, 2010
I've read several threads on this, but I cannot find any solution. I tried doing a delete and rebuild of the Spotlight index because it was recommended to do every now and then to improve performance. Ever since then, Spotlight won't index applications. I have Applications checked, I've even unchecked it, restarted and then rechecked it. I've rebuilt the Spotlight index three times and they don't show up. If I use Finder to edit Spotlight comments on an Application, all of a sudden it will show up, but not unless I do that. So, it seems like Spotlight ignores Applications until I do something that triggers Spotlight to see a comment and then all of a sudden the application appears in Spotlight.
All the solutions I have seen online are to check the privacy settings (I have nothing marked private) and to rebuild the index. Neither solution has worked. Does anything have any ideas what is causing most applications to not be picked up by Spotlight unless I add a comment and then erase it updating Spotlight?
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Apr 19, 2008
method of telling Spotlight to index network volumes. I can't locate it now, but noticed that the last posts about it were 1.5 years old.
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Jan 12, 2009
I noticed the other day that mds was taking up all my cpu power, and spotlight was trying to index my drive, with 876489 hours remaining. Did a bit of googling and found and got a terminal command to reset the whole of spotlight, left it over night next morning it was stuck at 90%. I then tried the application spotless to reset spotlight...left it over night now stuck on 89% with 157859 hours remaining. IMac G5 2.1Gz, 350GB of a 500GB drive used.
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Jul 6, 2009
New to Mac, I like having a clean dock with only a minimum amount of shortcuts to applications and to then use Spotlight to find others when I need them.
It seems though that not all applications appear in a spotlight search. For example I tried searching for iMovie but all I got was a dictionary definition. So I opened it up through the applications folder, and then after that spotlight found it ok.
The same is true for other applications that I haven't yet opened, such as iDVD.
Instead of going through and finding all the apps that are not indexed and opening them, is there a universal way to reindex spotlight?
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May 15, 2010
Earlier I posted a problem about the get info pane has something wrong in it, that the "more info" only shows the headline, while other things, like dimensions for the pictures, the bitrate of MP3 songs, etc.
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Mar 27, 2012
I've gone through some of the threads on here about this issue. I have tried adding my volume to privacy tab in spotlights preferences and removing it, but it wont even let me add it due to an error.Â
So I then tried command line indexing using sudo mdutil -E /, this just brings up the message in terminal no index.Â
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Jun 28, 2014
I just noticed that Spotlight does not seem to index the content of .txt files. It will pick up search strings in the names of text files, but not in the contents. Is there any way to get Spotlight to index the content of .txt files?
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Jan 6, 2008
I notice that Spotlight only says "indexing" after I restart the computer, which isn't that often.
But that's not the only time it indexes, right? Does it index a file whenever it's created or moved?
And what about Time Machine? Again, after restarting the computer, my external backup drive that I use with Time Machine is indexed. But I never notice it being indexed when I don't restart.
Does Spotlight have to index it, or does TM handle that somehow? I mean, can I put my backup disk on Spotlight's ignore list, and still have Spotlight in Time Machine work fine?
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May 8, 2008
When and how often does Spotlight index a drive? After 1-1/2 months of owning my MBA, Spotlight is indexing my drive today. I don't know if it is doing it for the first time. But it is the first time I noticed it, as it is slowing down everything, and is taking forever (~ 1-2 min for every 1%).
I would have thought my drive would be all indexed by now -- 90+ days of owning it.
I wonder if it has anything to do with what I am doing on my computer today, that may have trigger this. I copied 3 dvd movie files over and was ripping them with Handbrake today to get ready for a trip next week. I also connected an external drive to have it re-formated. However, after all the ripping was done, and external drive removed. It is still indexing at the moment (2 more hours to go according to the progress bar).
I am tempted to restart the computer, and stop the indexing. But then I shouldn't, if it's a part of the normal routine.
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Jun 2, 2012
Three days ago I was browsing the web when my cursor evidently brushed over an ad for MacKeeper. In a few seconds MacKeeper had downloaded itself without asking and taken over Safari. Since I don't like thuggish behavior in people or in software, as soon as I regained control of Safari I moved MacKeeper to the trash and did a "Secure Empty Trash." I then aimed Intego's Virus Barrier at the Downloads folder and it found nothing questionable. I checked out various webpages where people describe how to rid your computer of MacKeeper if you've installed it - - I didn't install it, but I checked in all the recommended places and found nothing visible. However whether it is a coincidence or there is a causal relation immediately after this incident, Spotlight began to re-index my two internal hard drives - - estimating first that it would take 3 days, then 7 days to index them. I wrote about this on another thread and received the following advice:Â
"Spotlight's probably in a wobble. A few things you could do:Â
1. Tell Spotlight to start again. Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app) and copy/paste this command:Â sudo mdutil -E /
Press 'return'. You'll be asked for your password, which will not echo when you type it, so type carefully.Â
Give Spotlight a few minutes then check on its progress, does it look like it's going to complete in a reasonable amount of time? If the problem persistsÂ
2. Restart your Mac in Safe mode and log in to your account.
This'll take a while. When it's finished, immediately restart and log in normally and check on Spotlight again."Â
I performed the first step. After a few minutes Spotlight estimated that it would complete indexing in 20 minutes. Over the next few hours it continued to increase its estimates to an ever larger number of hours.Â
Then I performed the second step. After completing it Spotlight's estimate was that it would take several days.Â
Eventually I performed the first step again and the same sequence of increasing estimates occurred. Â
I left the computer on overnight and by morning Spotlight estimated it would take 35 hours to complete indexing of my drives.Â
Later on I turned the computer off. When I started it up again Spotlight had started once again to re-index my drives and now estimates it will take 5 days. Â
None of this behavior had occurred before the mishap with MacKeeper. Since I have a recent clone of the startup drive that was made before this incident it seems possible that I could zero out my internal startup drive after saving any files that have changed to a DVD, use Virus Barrier to check if there is anything questionable present in the folder in which they are located and then clone the data from the backup drive back to the newly formatted internal hard drive. However I would rather not have to do this, so I would be most grateful for any less extreme suggestions.Â
Info:
Mac Pro (Early 2009), Mac OS X (10.7.4), 24GB RAM/MOTU 2408 mk3 audio interface
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Oct 7, 2010
I usually had spotlight search disabled, cause I don't really use the search at all .. well that was until yesterday I was looking for a file on the backup drive. Needless to say it took quite a while to find it, so I went back to considering spotlight again.
Long story short I switched on indexing for both the local disk (160GB) and the USB Backup Disk (1.5TB) and left spotlight running over night .. it is not quite there yet .. but the index is already almost 40Gb in total .. that is 20GB locally and then another 19GB on the USB disk.
So my question .. is that normal? Does spotlight store the index of the external disk locally again? I can't imagine the index of the ~100GB I have stored locally to be that big ..
Is it something normal while indexing and will reduce itself when it is done?
People usually report their indexes well below 1GB for larger disk than I use here at least that was what I found googling.
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Dec 12, 2009
I searched around on how to do this in 10.6, but the only things I could find were references to mdimport -f, which from what I understand is now obsolete.
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Jan 29, 2010
I would simply like to use cmd+spacebar to be able to search files that are located on my Time Capsule.
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May 17, 2012
It's actually one of five partions on the external drive, and the only one with a problem. Two of the other four are nicely on the Privacy List, and the other two are both indexed and kept nicely up to date. But the Fifth cannot be indexed, although it once was partially. I have run Spotless, which lists all other drives just as I expect but for this one it reports: "The Metadata Server is reporting that content indexing is DISABLED for the volume Fifth but the volume itself is reporting that the content indexing status is set to ENABLED." It is possible to find an 8Kb index on the volume, then Trash and delete it; Spotlight immediately re-creates another index-in-waiting but does not actually do the indexing or add anything in the folder. An added frustration is that the 'folder' is both invisible, locked and seems to be without 'ownership' or other conventional attributes.
1) I have done the primitive Add to Privacy and Remove Dance nothing has changed.
2) I have used Terminal, deleted all .Spotlight-V100 indexes, disabled Spotlight rebooted, renabled it and rebooted—nothing has changed. This included carefully following steps in other posters' accounts (some failed, some succeeded) and a site that gave a particularly thorough version.
3) I have used Spotless although it offers to do such things as Delete the empty index and re-start Indxing, it then reports it couldn't due to an unexpected error.
4) Some folks have pointed to another faulty invisible file variously naming it '.metadate_never_index' and '.metadataneverindex', to be found in '.hostconfig' or eleswhere at the root and destroyed, but I never didscovered anything like it. I did perhaps succeed in adding the line: SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to that file, based on another bit of advice, but it seems to have had no effect.
The terrible irony is that I use FindAnyFile and good ol' FileBuddy for all my searching. All I want is to 'Show Item Info' in Finder's View Options. Wouldn't you know that needs the Spotlight 'app'.Assuming the Spotless message is accurate, I need to convince the MetadataServer that indexing for that partition is enabled. How do I do that
Info:
McBk w/10.6.8, QkSlvrG4 w/10.3,10.4
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Jun 21, 2012
New mac user here. Running latest Lion (10.7.4) on a Macbook pro. I have Paragon NTFS installed, and reading/writing to NTFS volumes has worked fine. However, I am having an issue with spotlight on my external hard drive (500 gb, NTFS formatted). It simply does not work. Searching my internal main hd works fine.Â
I have tried several suggested solutions to this problem already. This includes adding and removing the hard drive from the privacy tab of spotlight. I also tried several terminal commands that I found online such as "sudo mdutil -E" and "sudo mdutil -i on". These all indicate that indexing on my external drive is in fact on. Spotlight does not seem to be indexing the drive. HOWEVER it does return results for folders that I have opened. Seems kind of strange. Doesn't help me much, as I am not about to open 1000's of folders and files just so they can be found through spotlight.Â
Info:
MacBook
Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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Jun 15, 2008
One of my important external hard drives recently died and I was wondering of there was a way to see a list of files that were on the drive before it crashed, maybe the spotlight index?
Before sending the drive in for recovery (and not attempting to change the logic board myself) I would like to see if there is any private data on the drive that I wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands.
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Mar 23, 2012
Successfully moved mail to another partition ~ however not getting Spotlight (or Mail) to index or search email since the move.Tried adding the folder to Spotlight privacy settings ~ then removing but no luck.Tried contacting Apple however moving mail from Libraries is not 'supported' so no love there. how to get Spotlight to search mail residing on another partition? Â
Info:
Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Feb 20, 2009
after a lot of thinking I ended up getting a new Aluminum Macbook! First Mac ever, so yay me!Anyway, when I booted into windows the first time I put in the Leopard install disk and everything went fine. When i booted back into windows i noticed "SMBus controller" and "Coproccesser" were not installed correctly. I looked at the Boot Disk DVD, ran "NvidiaChipset.exe", and after a reboot everything was great!
Then I ran window Experience index and my HDD is getting a pathetic score of 2.0. Just wondering if anyone else has this issue and how/if they got it working again.
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Mar 28, 2012
The problem I am having is that my spotlight runs fine and then after a period of using my imac (2 hours) the searches take longer and longer to do. This happens when I am searching using a window. So by holding the alt cmd space bar and then keying in my keywords.Â
If i search by going to the magnifying glass in the menu bar it searches as normal but then clicking on show all results its back to being slow. If I reboot the mac it continues to run fast and then eventually goes slow. I have tried rebuilding the spotlight databases but this has not helped.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Dec 22, 2010
An odd problem that has recurred on two of the installations of Snow Leopard I've had on my 27" iMac is that for some odd reason, using Spotlight will cause a slow system death.
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Jan 2, 2011
I recently bought the Areca 1880ix-16 card and the backplane cable to hook to the mac pro internal drives - hooked up 4 x seagate ST32000644NS 2TB enterprise drives for an internal RAID5 with 6TB of space. Used the DX4 from transinternational to hook up my 2 SSD drives. The initial raid build time was just about 2 days (!) for the raid 5. Shortly after that I left town for a few days and came back to an alarm in my computer - one of the disks had dropped out. The rebuild time was again close to 2 days!. At thipoint I realized that if I was sitting there with that much data at risk for a 2 day rebuild, it would be agonizing and so I needed to go raid6 (which had been my goal from the start, but only 4 internal disks is very limiting). So I gave up on managing my storage internally and bought an istorage pro it8SAS external box connected by miniSAS cable. The raid5 had to complete the rebuild before it would let me expand to raid6. I added another seagate ST32000644NS 2TB enterprise drive (interestingly the drive that was originally listed as failed has caused no further problems at all) and expanded the raid to RAID6 with the same capacity but one extra drive for parity. The rebuild now has been going on for almost 48 hours and it's at 53% I had NO idea the rebuild times would be this long. I do have 2.3TB of data on the array, so I'm not sure if that prolongs it vs. an empty array. But just for others info, take into consideration these times when deciding what your own needs are - I bought a high end (AFAIK) raid card, running in a high end computer (mac pro 3ghz octocore with 16GB RAM) and quality enterprise drives, and it's still maddeningly slow to rebuild. Hopefully once it's up and running, this will all be forgotten, and if I ever have a drive fail, I know I can still lose another one without any data loss. RAID6 seems the only way to go given these times for rebuild. FWIW, I also put in another 3 drives - old 500gb drives I had sitting around and built a secondary RAID5 array since I had the space, that completed in around 36 hours or so, and was done during the original raid5 rebuild.
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Feb 17, 2010
Does anyone happen to know offhand how the icons that make up the Application stack get rebuilt? I've noticed that when I install new applications or update old ones, I get the following sort of "not found" icon. They generally go away quickly, other times they hang around for days. So I'm assuming there's an automated process that generates them... I'd like to kick it off manually if possible.
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Jun 4, 2014
I am really careful about OXS upgrades, I have a Macbook Air 13" 4GB/256GB ssd, 2013. last monday I finally did the Mavericks upgrade; Mountain Lion was working great, but as Yosemite coming soon, I thought that was a good time to do it. Guess what...Â
Time Machine is NOT WORKING. I never had a problem with TM, and I use Mac since 90's, so I even can't remember when it came out, but I trade at least 4 Macs using TM and never had an issue.
Now, over Mavericks, it is taking forever. By just now, after almost 30 hours, it is backing up 8.57 GB of 60 GB. I already did the reformating of the TM's drive, it did not work.
I got a new HD external, reformatted on Disk Utility, turno ON and OFF and ON TIme Machine as I read it many times on other posts, and nothing.. It is just taking forever. I never saw this on any other OSX.
Spotlight is indexing too, taking too long, and probably this is the reason (or one of the reasons...) for TM take so long.
I started over wifi, I have an Aiport Express Extended thing, but my Macbook is really close to the first one, on the chain. I made sure that airport is connected to this one, and, it is.
I plugged my TrendNet USB-Ethernet cable, which works really great and fast. Nothing changes, System Preferences recognizes both connections, wifi and ethernet, both are working, but speed did not change at all... Â
I can't really believe that Apple will leave Time Machine users on this ridiculous situation. But what to do next.Â
Info:
MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
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Dec 30, 2008
Using Mail 2.1.3 I accidentally clicked Rebuild, and lost all 2008 messages from my Inbox (2007 and 2006 ones are there, and new ones come in OK). Sent box was not affected.
The messages seem to be in Users: Library: Mail and inbox.mbox . It was suggested I reinstall Mail, but I don't know how (I don't seem to have an original disc and it doesn't seem to be part of Office 2004).
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Sep 23, 2010
I have a mid 2010 MacPro 12 2.66 Ghz cpu system with 48 GB of ram. I was running Windows 7 32 bit on my Apple SSD drive, but thought that it would be interesting to see the performance difference if I installed Windows 7 64 bit. Due to SSD space limitations Windows 7 64 bit was installed on an internal hard disk rather than the SSD drive. Here are the results:
Windows 7 32 bit on Apple SSD TS512B configured with
2 GB of RAM
8 CPUs
Enable Adaptive Hypervisor checked
Processor 7.7
Memory 4.5
Graphics 6.0
Gaming 6.0
Hard disk 6.9
overall 4.5 (lowest score).
Windows 7 64 bit on Hitachi 2 TB drive HDS722020ALA330 configured with
8 GB of RAM
8 CPUs
Enable Adaptive Hypervisor checked
Processor 7.8
Memory 7.9
Graphics 6.0
Gaming 6.0
Hard disk 7.9
overall 6.0
I was surprised by the increase in memory speed, and even more so by the hard disk improvement - even though on a physical disk rather than an SSD. In two cases (memory and hard disk) it hits the maximum performance number possible of 7.9.
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Mar 28, 2012
Upgraded to 10.7.3 and mail says that 'Mail index has been damaged?' It goes through the importing of new mailboxes and then says import failed. I've fiddled, deleting the envelope files and soome other bits and now it's not working at all. Â
How can I delete this and reinstall MAIL? Â
I use googlemail for my email account. iMac 27" Mid 2011Processor 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7Memory 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MBSoftware Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (11D50)
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May 17, 2012
I think the title says it all, but to elaborate if I re-index the files on my harddrive, I was wondering if the indexing algorithm index my files more efficiently, perhaps due to the added freedom of not having to assimilate into an existing file lookup table.I have bagillions of science monographs in my file system, and spotlight now takes tens of seconds to find stuff.
Info:
MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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