Tiger Spotlight Less Then Optimal

Anonymous Coward writes "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted. Additionally, Spotlight doesn't come with a manual to teach you how to create complex queries. Most simple available queries --style popup menu selection-- are not powerful enough to be really useful. A tutorial on http://www.scribent.com/ will explain how you can optimize Spotlight's behaviour and get the most of it, but all in all it seems like Apple has been overhyping in the extremes."

Definitely not great here

[amake]

I've had a lot of problems with Spotlight. When I have a large external hard drive (160GB divided into 3 partitions) attached, I will find at random times that the processes mds and LAServer will start eating all of my CPU. This occurs despite the fact that all of my drives, including the external, have already been completely indexed. I've tried re-indexing (sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/volname), I've tried disabling indexing alltogether ( sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/volname). None of these solutions worked. The only thing that has kept my CPU usage normal is leaving my external drive disconnected, although I've found that that only decreases the frequency of these mds attacks, not prevents them entirely.

I've also been experiencing frustrations with slow file copying (especially with rsync) that I suspect to be Spotlight- or metadata-related.

All in all it's been a pretty frustrating upgrade (actually, clean install to be exact) for me. I hope these issues are addressed in 10.4.2 (yes, I've submitted bug reports).

Links please?

[Mensa Babe]

Here's a link for anyone wondering what the Tiger Spotlight [apple.com] is. (In short: With Spotlight, you can find anything on your computer as quickly as you type. Search your entire system from one place: Files, emails, contacts, images, calendars and applications appear instantly.)

(By the way, here's a direct link to the article [scribent.com] in question.)

Anyway, call me oldfashioned but an Anonymous Coward writing "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users" is hardly the end of the world. Innovative interfaces may be "major pain" for an AC on Slashdot but meanwhile a lot of people in the Real World find it very useful (pun not intended), all the "overhyping in the extremes" (or even overhyping to the max) notwithstanding. Don't like it? Don't use it! Simple as that. Fortunately, as always with Apple, there's more than one way to do it. Do you think that Microsoft's SQL filesystem works better? Use Longhorn then.

come on now...

[ansleybean]

if apple had been trumpeting "UNIX SYSADMINS: NEVER USE GREP AGAIN!" then they would have been over-hyping in the extreme. as it is, spotlight is the best answer we currently have to "i saved my thingie and now i can't find it!" syndrome. it has its flaws, and some will be ironed out. what's the big deal? besides, it is possible to turn it off - google for turn spotlight off. done.

Re:Links please?

[taskforce]

I think the idea was that people are having trouble with it because it can't be turned off. I'm sure that even the most hating AC on Slashdot would like to have Spotlight sitting next to his menus if there was no performance hit, but there is a point where the performance hit caused by having an indexing service constantly running unnessecarily in the background and eating your res makes it a bad thing.

More pseudo-journalism we don't need on /.

[Nice2Cats]

Though it is nice to see a discussion of this and the comments are useful, what is really getting to annoy me are the pseudo-journalist editorial lead-ins:

Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted.

Just how did this AC arrive that the "many users" thing? Was there a poll among all Tiger users? How about "some" or "a couple" or "a few" or "one or two guys I just happened to know" instead? Sort of changes the whole story, right? This sort of thing is one of the reasons why people are turning away from the tradition media: They are sick and tired of everything being hyped. Please, just the facts, OK?

For the record: I use Spotlight on my aging iBook G4 800 MHz and don't see any speed problems. If anything, Tiger is a lot faster than Panther was (and my hardware doesn't even support those nifty Core whatever features). If you are that much into speed tuning, I suggest looking into Gentoo [gentoo.org].