After updating to Sequoia, there is noticeable lag in typing and search results showing up.
It takes approximately 2-3 seconds before any result show up. Used to be way faster on Sonoma.
EDIT: I want to attach video here but it's not letting me.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Air
macOS has some background tasks to complete after an upgrade. These tasks can take anywhere from an hour to a day depending on the Mac's resources and your setup.
If it doesn't improve, there are a coupe of things that you can do.
1) Use Safe Mode. see > Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
2) Rebuild Spotlight. see > Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support
macOS has some background tasks to complete after an upgrade. These tasks can take anywhere from an hour to a day depending on the Mac's resources and your setup.
If it doesn't improve, there are a coupe of things that you can do.
1) Use Safe Mode. see > Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
2) Rebuild Spotlight. see > Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support
I use Spotlight for context switching through multiple apps, so I need this to be instant. Any minor delay from what it usually performs as is literally handicapping productivity.
</rant>
The workaround I have so far: Open activity monitor, find spotlight, quit it. After it terminates, hit command space again, it respawns and it's performing well again.
I hope this helps.
Not in my case. Typing in "cale" and hitting enter to launch Calendar just leaves "cale" sitting on screen for at least 4 seconds before it completes "cale" to "calendar.app" and launches it. This is true for any app on my Mac Studio.
Killing the Spotlight process using Activity Monitor or typing pkill -9 Spotlight restores it to its previous zippy behavior (for a while).
EXACTLY!
I have remapped spotlight to my caps lock key, and it is CENTRAL to my use of a mac.
Based on your note, I found that we can use "pkill -9 Spotlight" in terminal to kill spotlight.
I might build a keyboard macro to do it via a keyboard shortcut.
Totally gross, but at least I can function.
Thanks for telling me!
If the delay bothers you feel free to send Apple feedback.
I have the same issue. I'll type something in Spotlight and it's just stagnant, nothing appears. I upgraded to Sequoia a month ago, so it's not that. I've also rebuilt the index since then with no change.
In video, if you see it will take time to display the results in that list. I complete writing safari and then the list will come. And in terms of safari its relatively faster but I type something else it will sometimes takes even more than 4 seconds sometimes. Earlier before update, as soon as I type "Saf" it will populate the list with suggestions. This is 3-4x times slower after update.
@dialabrain, you wrote: "if you search for an installed app, say "safari", it will find it before you can finish typing."
In the video from @thisisjaymehta, is clearly does not: the word "safari" is typed, and the result appears AFTER the user has finished typing the entire word "safari" up to the last letter.
In my case, it takes 15s to display results since a couple of weeks at least. It's excruciating.
I'm also having this issue after upgrading to Sequoia.
Mine shows the result but after a significant delay of like 2-3 seconds.
Does not help. Still search result have at least 2-3 seconds of delay after I start typing.
It does on all my Macs running Sequoia 15.2.
Even in your video it does.
Thanks, I have submitted as performance bug. Hopefully they give some attention to this issue as this is frustrating.
Slow Spotlight Search after MacOS Sequoia update on MacBook Air M2
