spotlight slow after big sur update

I wanted to share a solution that worked for me after searching endlessly.

For me the issue was related to using Time Machine, so if you don't use Time Machine and back up to an external drive this won't help you per se. However, if you use an external drive in any fashion, you may want to try this to see if it helps.

I simply excluded my Time Machine external drive in Spotlight preferences. So I went to Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy and then clicked the + button in the bottom left. Then I added my external drive which I use for Time Machine backups. Almost instantly, my Spotlight lag was significantly reduced. It's just about like normal.

Just incase anyone is wondering, I am running a 2017 i5 Quad Core 27inch iMac with Fusion Drive.

I hope this helps someone out there!

Hey Jwk47midd,

Thanks for your post. It sounds as though Spotlight is performing slower than expected after a recent Big Sur update. We'll do our best to assist.

When you update the software, Spotlight will re-index the contents of your drive for quicker results. This should perform better after about 24-48 hours, depending on the content it needs to re-index.

If this doesn't clear up, you could always try to manually select it to re-index the drive. Here's how to accomplish this: Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac Same thing applies after the reindex process, this could take up to 48 hours.

Should it persist, are you using any external drives?

Wishing you the best, take care!

I have the same problem. I found an article that showed how to trigger re-indexing by excluding the entire disc from the index, and then removing this exclusion. After doing that it took a while for the indexing to be complete. But, I still have slow response from spotlight.

Thanks, the response time seems better, though not as fast as it was.

ALSO, for MS Word I had to type in Microsoft but it seems to have learnt that one, so that I can go back to typing 'word'.

* I think it is learning and slowly getting back to its old self.

When I try your instructions to exclude Time Machine I get the msg

“Time Machine1” is a Time Machine backup folder. You cannot add it to the privacy list."

("Time Machine 1" is the name of my ext volume)

Is there a trick to it? I excluded another external drive and that sped up Spotlight quite a bit so this has definitely helped the situation.

How many tens of thousands of files and directories change after a Big Sur update? Spotlight has to re-index all of that, and it is not a quick process. And Spotlight has to finish this activity before a Time Machine backup can occur.

Fantastic! Very happy to hear that. At-least that's one thing that makes sense in 2021 so far....

Thanks for the solution. It did the trick!

Worked for me too.

I'll be ******—this has been bugging me for several months, and your solution seems to do the trick for me too! Thanks a lot for sharing!

J.-P.

Worked great, thank you.

2013 Mac Pro

Thank you so much, the results are now immediate as you type. You've saved me a bunch of time! 😊

I did the trick almost instantly.

Yet search in Notes app as well as in Mail app are still very very slow...

Thanks allot !