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Spotlight forever indexing

Can anyone indicate how I can get spotlight to index properly? I've tried suggestions such as:

Placing HD in Privacy and then removing.
Using mdutil to stop and restart indexing.
Cursing.

Here is an example of the system log:

Sep 6 08:10:25 birds-imac.home mds[35]: (/)(Warning) IndexQuery in bool preIterate_FSI(SISearchCtx_FSI *):Throttling inefficient file system query

Sep 6 08:10:27 birds-imac.home mds[35]: (/)(Warning) IndexQuery in virtual bool SISearchCtx_FSI::performSearch(struct PartialQueryResults *):Retried searchfs 4 times

Sep 6 08:42:20 birds-imac.home mds[35]: (/)(Warning) IndexQuery in bool preIterate_FSI(SISearchCtx_FSI *):Throttling inefficient file system query

Sep 6 08:42:28 birds-imac.home mds[35]: (/)(Warning) IndexQuery in bool preIterate_FSI(SISearchCtx_FSI *):Throttling inefficient file system query

Sep 6 08:42:33 birds-imac.home mds[35]: (/)(Warning) IndexQuery in virtual bool SISearchCtx_FSI::performSearch(struct PartialQueryResults *):Retried searchfs 4 times

I don't know what else to try.

Thanks,

Traj

iMac (20-inch Early 2009), OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Sep 6, 2012 5:57 AM

48 replies

Dec 31, 2013 8:00 PM in response to Christopher Murphy

I know this is an old thread. The problem was new to me, today. I've been struggling with 'tuning up' my computer (rebuilding MS Outlook identities) and something went awry. The indexing never stopped no matter how many reboots.

Never gave a time, just kept the working to figure that out. Nonstop for 10 hours. Everything was slow.

I read countless pages on the net, and Christopher Murphy's post on the bottom of page two seemed likely. I can count on my hand how many times I've used the terminal program. Scary.

I followed his instructions, cut and pasted, hit go, and the first command stopped the madness. Quiet.

I then rebooted, added back in the indexing command again, hit it again, and THIS time it spent a few mins considering the work, and then it had a time status bar which took only 40 mins to completely do the indexing.

It was fixed!

I love the forums for helping, and I want to say thanks and hopefully steer the next frustrated soul to a manageable fix on their own.

Jim Cooper

peterios

Level 1

0 points

Jan 6, 2014 2:26 AM in response to Ken Trajanowski

I just found the same issue on my MBA. And I solved the problem after some googling.

The cause is from my 64G SD card volume. So I :

Add the SD card volume to Privacy in Spotlight setting. And indexing stop right away.

Then I remove SD card volume from Privacy. Index start and stop under a minute.

That's it. Problem solved.

Hope it might help.

Peter

iPost

Level 1

0 points

May 17, 2014 1:43 AM in response to peterios

Thanks

This worked for me. Was still suffering from this problem with 10.9.2 - not causing any obvious slowdown, but irritating nonetheless.

In fact, I didn't remove the SD card volume from Privacy after adding it as I don't really need its contents indexed anyway. Hooray, no more "estimating index time".

Spotlight forever indexing