Spotlight very slow under Catalina and Server app

I noticed that, for me, calculations and apps are retrieved very quickly by Spotlight, but files and folders take many seconds (before Catalina, everything happened nearly instantly). I'm thinking it maybe has something to do with the new partitions Catalina adopts, which separates system files and user data.

Will someone at Apple please take a serious look into this?

I'm having this issue and i hope apple plans to do something about this problem!

Calculation and search results takes several seconds before it displays! Turning on and off suggestions does not work either!

Turn off Spotlight Suggestions

1. On your Mac, choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, click Spotlight, then click Search Results.
2. Deselect the “Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Look up” checkbox.
3. In the list, deselect the Spotlight Suggestions checkbox.

Now Spotlight searches only the contents of your Mac. Look up searches only the dictionaries enabled on your Mac.

Come on apple! fix the issue!

I got similar issues previously,

but now It has been solved.

I use the solution that I posted above.

try to do this:

• open the spotlight preferences
• uncheck “allow spotlight suggestion in lookup”
• Rebuilt your spotlight index (you can find how to do this in google).
• wait until finished (there is an indexing indicator on top of spotlight result page)
• check “allow spotlight suggestion in look up”

these are what I did with my macbook to solve this problem. Hopefully you will get same result.

Hi..

I got this problem in my macbook pro, But it works on my iMac,

This morning I tried to configure my macbook pro soptlight by using similar config to my iMac.

Voila..

it works!

I just enabled this checklist:

When it is disabled, my spotligh does not work as expected.

So, I enable it now.. IT WORKS

I followed the suggested steps... but I still have the same problem.

Even after the index rebuild with the option unchecked (it tooks 2 hours on my mac),

looking for "69+1" on Spotlight uses a lot of CPU:

Before Catilina I always was able to fix Spotlight problems with rebuilding or excluding folders in the Privacy tab

Hello,

I have the same trouble.

There are few seconds before the result is display.

I have already "redo" the spotlight index. It don't solve the slow display of spotlight results.

Please Apple; Resolve this trouble.

Pierre

Same for me: doing calulations tkes a lot a there is a spike in CPU usage.

The process who is using the CPU is mds_stores.

If I disable the indexing with sudo mdutil -ai off is fast again but... of course is not indexing any more

I've already tried to rebuild the index and to exclude some directories but it doesn't help...

I hope Apple will fix it soon

Unfortunately it didn't work for me. I checked the Spotlight Suggestions box, rebooted, reindexed and still nothing.

My problem is that I constantly use Spotlight to open files and folders, and now I have to wait 5 seconds or more until it finds them, whereas before it was almost instant.

Already updated to macOS 10.15.2 and still no progress. This is awful, I really wish I hadn't installed Catalina!

Same issue. I have relied on Spotlight as I need fast access to a fair amount amount of data (3T). This issue has crippled my operations. I've taken my work stuff and (begrudgingly) moved to a Lenovo, which is my employer's standard. I'm off loading my personal stuff from my MacBook Pro to my Mac Mini in order to go back to reload Mojave.

At this point, any fix is too little too late.

Wow this fix – turning on all Spotlight settings, i.e. to search across all categories – also worked for me! Calculations are back to being instant. What a dumb bug. But thankfully what an easy fix! Thanks benjooles for the tip.

S.

That didn't work for me. I finally went through Apple support and worked my way up to a senior specialist. She took some logs and eventually came back with some terminal commands to force re-indexing. I had the issue on 2 machines and all back to normal now. Apologies that I wasn't savvy enough to copy and paste the terminal commands.

Good Afternoon AlHagar,

please, try to copy this terminal-commands... It's very important for us to resolv the trouble....

After open the terminal,

you are able to go back in the history, with the narrow up.

to copy , you select the command and right-clic and "copy"....

Thank a lot for us,

Pierre

I have several Spotlight issues since upgrading to Catalina, including also having to wait a long time for search results to appear whereas before results showed up almost instantly. I've also noticed that not all files show up in search results. I can be staring at the file in finder and when I type in the filename, it doesn't come up in the search results (either in Spotlight search or when searching within the Finder Folder. I did a fresh brand new install of Catalina (new user profile and everything - as if it came from the factory), and after all of my data was manually copied over (most of it synced from Dropbox) I still have the same issues.

Do any other users on this post use Dropbox to sync their data? Trying to see if Spotlight has issues with searching specifically within the Dropbox folder.

Somebody has started a thread on the Spotlight latency issue on "Ask Different". There I've provided an answer- that the fault is a result of a material change being made by Apple in Catalina- and the resolution- that the same Software Engineers will have to resolve the fault in a future patch. Might be useful to see the ground already covered troubleshooting this fault and I offer some diagnostic tips with annotated graphics in the answer.

But yes, if Spotlight was working BEFORE Catalina upgrade and AFTER the upgrade it is now in an incorrect state (which is what I'm distilling from comments), the change and the resulting fault were made on Apple's side.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/379986/spotlight-is-slow-in-catalina

I got similar problem like this.

But it works now since I re-enabled this checklist: