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EJW Tas Author

Level 1

62 points

spotlight constantly indexing

Help please. On my MacBook 13" aluminum with 4GB RAM and 250GB HD, spotlight is constantly indexing my drive. NO external HDs connected. I have wiped the Spotlight file and still Spotlight takes up 100% of Memory and the fans are running at 6000rpm (max) for hours. When completed, I restart my machine and Spotlight re-starts indexing my Mac. I need spotlight to find my files, so permamently turning it off is not an option.

I have scoured the web, I have re-installed 10.6 Snow Leopard and various updaters, I have zeroed my drive and restored from TM and all to no avail.

This laptop is one inch away from becoming e-waste!

Does anyone have any NEW ideas about Spotlight soaking up all RAM and CPU constantly? While this is happening, nothing else can run (Word, Firefox etc) all hang due to a lack of resources. I bought the mac to work, not watch it work without me.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Apr 17, 2011 4:50 PM

Top-ranking reply

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,673 points

Posted on Apr 17, 2011 5:32 PM

First, launch the Console application and select system.log from the list of logs. In the filtering text box, enter "mdworker" (without the quotes.) Do you see any error messages?

Open the Spotlight preference pane and click on the Privacy tab. Add your startup volume to the list of locations that are excluded from searching. Does the indexing stop? Remove the volume from the list. Does it start again?

Assuming the answer to the last two questions is "yes," the next step is to make more selective additions to the exclusion list until the indexing activity is tolerable.

View in context

20 replies

Aug 14, 2011 1:22 PM in response to A. Roger Ricketts

Same problen here, on I installed Lion weeks ago and it's constantly reindexing upon startup, how can I make it stop, other than turning spotlight off?

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,673 points

Aug 14, 2011 1:34 PM in response to Joseph Saxon

If the suggestions made in this thread didn't help you, then your problem is different from the OP's. Please start a new thread to address it.

Tyerc

Level 1

8 points

Sep 15, 2011 2:14 PM in response to Linc Davis

I'm having an Spotlight problem also that seems to have started within the past few days. When I open console, these are the error messages...

Sep 8 10:09:42 Macintosh-2 mdworker[4533]: Error, could not create MachMessagePort for com.apple.AddressBook.abd

Sep 15 08:53:17 Macintosh-2 mdworker[177]: (Error) SyncInfo: Catalog changed during searchfs too many times -- falling back to fsw search /

Sep 15 16:55:19 Macintosh-2 mdworker[192]: Error, could not create MachMessagePort for com.apple.AddressBook.abd

I've opened Spotlight preferences and under privacy put in the Applications folder but it hasn't stopped the indexing problem.

AlexZulu

Level 1

15 points

Sep 29, 2011 7:33 AM in response to EJW Tas

My Macbook Air snowleopard used to be slow for a long time. I send it to mac store and they "fix the system". Make it better, but still slow.

Then spotlight started indexing and I found almost 75% CPU running.

I found this article: http://kb.ucla.edu/articles/turn-off-spotlight-indexing-in-snow-leopard

I disabled indexing and now my MBA is super fast like when it was new. CPU is only 4% running 😎

Sorry my bad English 😉

Jan 30, 2014 12:25 AM in response to Linc Davis

In the Spotlight preferences under privacy there is nothing listed. Completely blank. What should I do?

spotlight constantly indexing