Funky frank Posted April 6, 2017 Share Posted April 6, 2017 Hi, lately upgraded to 10.12.4 from 10.9. Spotlight is now used in Mail and a lot of applications as a search engine, too. In 10.9.4 I simply disabled spotlight and used Quicksilver, it was a great time. Now it turns out the spotlight still seems to be a resource hog. I already disabled lot of search types and locations in the spotlight settings, rebuilt index etc. 1. It uses huge amounts of processes of "mdworker", even if the amount of indexing should be heavily reduced by the settings. Have a look below. 2. If it indexes, it always uses huge amounts of cpu. 3. It wildly accesses the ssd, so I guess it causes hard drives to failure much more early than usual (had that 3 times using normal hdds, before I started to disable it) 4. Even if I disable "com.apple.mdworker.bundles", I can see in the activity monitor that it still uses all those spotlight plugins in /System/Library/Spotlight/... 5. Sometimes it causes other processes to go wild. For example opendirectoryd. So my question are: - How can I reduce the amount of mdworker - Is it maybe possible, that I can only enable mds, but disable all those extra services, so I get search in the apps and nothing more? - Should I disable some daemons/agents related to it? Thanks for ideas! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaLd0n Posted April 6, 2017 Share Posted April 6, 2017 i create one .command for easy way, hepl me a lot in all installs Check disable spotlight.command.zip for enable just changed to On Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Funky frank Posted April 6, 2017 Author Share Posted April 6, 2017 i create one .command for easy way, hepl me a lot in all installs Check disable spotlight.command.zip for enable just changed to On Hm, but then I also will loose search functionality in mail and notes, no? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaLd0n Posted April 6, 2017 Share Posted April 6, 2017 try, if loose just changed off to on i never test in mail or notes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Funky frank Posted April 7, 2017 Author Share Posted April 7, 2017 I now moved away lot of spotlight plug-ins from /sys/lib/spotlight, which greatly increased scan time. Though after a full scan those mdworker processes still keep hanging. It seems they will hang at some specific .ds_store files, which always are located in the library dir. So I recursively removed all ds-store from library.... Let's see if that helps.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VirusX Posted April 7, 2017 Share Posted April 7, 2017 Just a quick side note: Spotlight does need some more resources after the installation for indexing everything. But that should be over after some time (depending on the number of hard drives etc). Did you give Spotlight some time for that before you declared it a resource hog and fiddled with the services? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Funky frank Posted April 9, 2017 Author Share Posted April 9, 2017 Thanks, yes I did. The processes were hanging at specific .DS_store files, without continuing. Now it seems to work nicely. Also disabled lots of spotlight plugins that I don't need, like archive, Audio, Video, Font, Image, iPhoto, Bookmarks, MIDI Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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