Spotlight failing repeatedly in iOS 9.2

I have the same issue on my iPhone 6 running 9.2. Spotlight returns nothing, no matter what I search for.

I've tried all the home remedies, such as:

1. Send an email to yourself
2. Restart iOS
3. Disable Contacts in Spotlight search
4. "Reset All Settings"

I have not tried wiping my iPhone yet. That's the nuclear option I'm loathe to use because I hate configuring my stuff all over again, and there's no guarantee it will resolve things. I'm afraid this issue is something endemic to my particular iPhone, like an obscure bug is getting triggered by something that's only present on my phone.

It's pathetic I can't search for anything on my iPhone. Looking for stuff is for suckers.

My iPhone started malfunctioning in a new and exciting way: cellular service stopped working entirely. For the previous 24 hours my iPhone said NO SERVICE and no amount of rebooting, shutdowns, or "Reset Network" or "Reset Settings" would bring service back. I finally capitulated and erased the iPhone and restored from my iTunes backup. It worked. Cellular service was restored and Spotlight started working again.

Then I performed the tasks I loathe: re-programmed my fingerprints for TouchID, added my credit cards to Apple Pay, and now iTunes is copying over my 100GB music library, which takes several hours. I think this is the fourth time I've had to perform this routine in the last six months.

Apple needs a better remediation option than forcing users to start over, and over, and over again.

Spotlight stopped working again. It seemed to happen after my 90GB music library finished synching with my iPhone, which feels like a two-part process. The first part is iTunes transferring the music to the iPhone. That took around two hours. The second part is the iPhone parsing all the songs and building the library for the Music app. For my library, this took around 13 hours, during which time the "synching spinner" in the status bar continued to spin and songs slowly trickled into the Music app over the course of half a day. While this was happening, Spotlight worked. When the spinner stopped and all the music had been digested, Spotlight stopped returning any search results. 😟

My iPhone 6 updated to iOS 9.3.1 an hour ago and Spotlight Search is still broken for me.

I downloaded iOS Console and looked at the console output when trying to perform a Spotlight Search. Here is what I saw:

Apr 5 15:42:18 jPhone searchd[286] : (Error) IndexGeneral in si_playBackMobileRecords:2343: played back 0 records Apr 5 15:42:19 jPhone searchd[286] : (Error) IndexGeneral in si_playBackMobileRecords:2343: played back 0 records Apr 5 15:42:19 jPhone diagnosticd[83] : unable to find offset 0x81448aac in shared cache for arch 'arm64' Apr 5 15:42:19 jPhone diagnosticd[83] : unable to find offset 0x814467cc in shared cache for arch 'arm64' Apr 5 15:42:19 jPhone diagnosticd[83] : unable to find offset 0x81649da8 in shared cache for arch 'arm64' Apr 5 15:42:19 jPhone diagnosticd[83] : Invalid offset 2170854824 into shared cache for arch 'arm64' Apr 5 15:42:19 jPhone ReportCrash[288] : platform_task_update_threads failed 1 Apr 5 15:42:19 jPhone ReportCrash[288] : Formulating report for process[286] searchd Apr 5 15:42:19 jPhone ReportCrash[288] : report not saved because it is non-actionable Apr 5 15:42:21 jPhone UserEventAgent[26] : jetsam: kernel termination snapshot being created Apr 5 15:42:21 jPhone ReportCrash[289] : Saved type '298(298)' report (2 of max 25) at /var/mobile/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/JetsamEvent-2016-04-05-154221.ips

According to this, the searchd crash log is not being saved because it is "non-actionable." However, a log for "JetsamEvent" is being created at roughly the same time. I looked at this file on my iPhone and JetsamEvents appear to be a low-memory (RAM) issue. Here is the top portion of the crash report.

{"timestamp":"2016-04-05 15:42:21.21 -0500","bug_type":"298","os_version":"iPhone OS 9.3.1 (13E238)"} { "crashReporterKey" : "88540025a9600afa364c269a2c5bc8a91370b1ca", "kernel" : "Darwin Kernel Version 15.4.0: Fri Feb 19 13:54:49 PST 2016; root:xnu-3248.41.4~28\/RELEASE_ARM64_T7000", "product" : "iPhone7,2", "incident" : "D0ED493F-7687-49D9-AFB9-BEE80BD93082", "date" : "2016-04-05 15:42:21.21 -0500", "build" : "iPhone OS 9.3.1 (13E238)", "timeDelta" : 95, "memoryStatus" : { "compressorSize" : 50489, "pageSize" : 4096, "compressions" : 824422, "memoryPages" : { "active" : 101577, "throttled" : 0, "fileBacked" : 37711, "wired" : 49311, "anonymous" : 114469, "purgeable" : 0, "inactive" : 48272, "free" : 2459, "speculative" : 2331 }, "uncompressed" : 172172, "decompressions" : 362924 }, "largestProcess" : "searchd",

According to this, the "largestProcess" was searchd when the crash report was generated. Further down in the crash report is searchd's information:

{ "rpages" : 129777, "states" : [ "daemon" ], "name" : "searchd", "pid" : 286, "reason" : "highwater", "fds" : 100, "uuid" : "7b301993-286d-3da5-a497-b729984d3229", "purgeable" : 0, "cpuTime" : 2.481274, "lifetimeMax" : 84765 },

Apparently the maximum for searchd is "84,765" but it reached "129,777." The reason is "highwater" which I assume means searchd exceeded its RAM allotment. So maybe my Spotlight index is too large. Too many iMessages, too many songs, too many emails... Who knows.

The "report not saved because it is non-actionable" for searchd's crash report is worrisome. I fear this bug is nowhere on Apple's radar. We might be marginal outliers without recourse for a long time.

Glad I could be of some assistance!

Your RAM usage must be right on the redline with your Spotlight searches. It runs hot, but sometimes it works. My Spotlight, on the other hand, explodes every time. Rebooting does nothing, perhaps because my iMessage store is too large (2.5 GBs) or I have too many songs (20,000+) in my Music app. Both of these (iMessage and Music) are disabled in Spotlight's settings, but I'm guessing they are still clogging the searchd index.

My gut feeling is the songs are the culprit. It takes two hours to transfer them all to my iPhone, then 13 hours (!!) for them to get processed by the Music app. It's clearly an inefficient process that needs optimization, but I'm not hopeful it will ever improve. Apple would rather their customers keep their music in iCloud and use their Music service.

Like you said, future iOS releases will only put a greater pinch on the 1GB of RAM in the iPhone 6. Mine was little over a year old before Apple's relentless OS update schedule broke system-wide search for me, which is inarguably a vital feature. For the last five months I've had to manually find things on my phone, an utterly absurd task for me to be performing in the modern computing era.

I am feeling very pessimistic right now.

Yes, launching apps with "Siri App Suggestions" works for me.

I agree about Spotlight's filtering behavior; it was pretty clunky, as I dimly recall now.

I just updated to iOS 9.3.2 and Spotlight Search is working again on my iPhone 6. It hasn't worked for six months. I think I'm in shock.