Anyone else experiencing delays in Spotlight results in Big Sur?
When I try to use Spotlight Search [Command+space bar], I get no immediate results, it just hangs for about 30 seconds before showing results. Sometimes pushing the down arrow helps, but not always.
MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
Folks, it's that the external USB hard drives are spun down to save power, and they take several seconds to spin back up and be mounted by MacOS.
Rebuilding your index won't help, as @morgankrane has proved.
Until Apple FIXES THIS BUG*, there are two workarounds: (1) unplug your external drives unless you are actively using them, or (2) replace them with external SSD drives that will not have to spin down, and therefore will avoid the cause of this lag.
Vexedly -- Peter
*Apple, Spotlight should go ahead and return index hits immediately, and if the user clicks on one that links to an unmounted drive, then it can take the delay. I want my immediate calculation functionality back!!
Folks, it's that the external USB hard drives are spun down to save power, and they take several seconds to spin back up and be mounted by MacOS.
Rebuilding your index won't help, as @morgankrane has proved.
Until Apple FIXES THIS BUG*, there are two workarounds: (1) unplug your external drives unless you are actively using them, or (2) replace them with external SSD drives that will not have to spin down, and therefore will avoid the cause of this lag.
Vexedly -- Peter
*Apple, Spotlight should go ahead and return index hits immediately, and if the user clicks on one that links to an unmounted drive, then it can take the delay. I want my immediate calculation functionality back!!
Hello morgankrane,
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities! We understand that you're experiencing delays returning results using Spotlight on your Mac after upgrading to macOS Big Sur.
If the issue is specific to Spotlight, and you're not experiencing delays with any other apps and features, try rebuilding Spotlight index on the Mac:
Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac
Take care.
Yes, there appears to be a correlation to connected drives. When I disconnect my USB3 SATA drive Spotlight responds instantaneously. I use this drive for TimeMachine backups, so maybe Re-Indexing it could speed things up.
Good call PHSchmidt !
I’ve had a similar problem, and it turned out it’d mainly been caused by an external hard drive used for Time Machine backups that’s constantly connected to the Mac. Once I excluded the Time Machine drive from search index, Spotlight became much faster.
My incredible lag in Spotlight is connected to my Time Machine external disk. When I eject that disk, Spotlight is quick to respond. With it mounted, Spotlight requires 10 to 20 seconds to do almost anything at all.
Need to get this ironed out. But I hope this info helps someone.
It is lagging for me, too - very annoying!
I believe the cause is it wants to touch all the mounted volumes. My external hard drives spin down when not in use, so they both have to wake up before Spotlight becomes responsive.
Apple, can we please have a preference to disable this behavior???
I rebuilt my Index and there is still a significant lag (~25-30 seconds) from when I type my search keywords into Spotlight.
It would be helpful to know if this is a known bug or isolated case.
I am running BIg Sur 11.0.1 on a 2014 MacBook Air w/4GB RAM and 128GB drive. The ⌘+spacebar shortcut launches Spotlight instantaneously. That raises the question about what is running on your Mac that is eating your CPU cycles and causing the Spotlight launch delay? Anti-virus products are known for their CPU greed. Time Machine backups too.
Add the Time Machine external drive to list of locations for Spotlight NOT to index.
The index will briefly rebuild itself, and then your performance should improve significantly.
Spotlight Search Lag
