Spotlight not working correctly

Christopher Murphy wrote:

I might have a working "fix". Based on the constant stalling on sandbox-cache.db I decided to take a chance and delete all folders found in /var/folders using the command. What I actually did, in order:

Restored Evernote, Colloquy, LibreOffice back to /Applications (from the Trash).

Quit all applications except Terminal, issued the following two commands:

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo rm -Rf /var/folders/*

Reboot.

sudo mdutil -i on /

There were no further stalls on sandbox-cache.db according to opensnoop, and no further lsboxd complaints in Console. mds and mdworker processes have been very busy, typically 40-100% CPU, unlike before. And now the index estimate is variably saying 6 to 19 minutes for completion instead of 3 days to 5 weeks. So hopefully in an hour or so (the typical amount of time for my system to do a Spotlight index rebuild) I will know if this has really worked.

Now, blowing away the folders in /var/folders may have other consequences, possibly negative, for sandboxing. But the files therein appear to be recreated from scratch after reboot to no ill effect or complaints in Console. But let's just say, the suffering bleeding edgers may end up bleeding a lot more by trying this. Any volunteers?

Also posted this response in : Apple Support Communities > Mac OS & System Software > OS X Mountain Lion > Re: Spotlight forever indexing

THANKS Chris!

my indexing went from 5 MONTHS to 2 Hours... fingers crossed!

Awesome. Thanks so much for posting this. I had downgraded back to 10.7.4 (not the simplest of tasks with Apple's buggy Mac App Store). My indexing estimates was 7 months! After the workaround took about an hour.

Note: I left TextEdit open while performing this so I could copy and paste into terminal.

Cheers.

Christopher Murphy wrote:

Quit all applications except Terminal, issued the following two commands:

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo rm -Rf /var/folders/*

Reboot.

sudo mdutil -i on /

You really save my day. BIG THANKS. I almost went crazy because Spotlight said it would take 3 weeks for re-indexing! Without reindexing, I couldn't backup because TM didn't seem working. Even worse every time I rebooted the MBPR, it would restart reindexing from scratch! After doing what you suggested, Sportlight said it would take 45 mins to reindex. 3 weeks vs. 45 mintues...... What evil thing Apple did for the 10.7.5??

Let me ask you this simple question:

Where you having trouble with spot light BEFORE you updated to 10.7.5? Cause if you were NOT, (just like the rest of us), then it's not any 3rd part App. It's 10.7.5!

Possibly a little OT, but I was trying to figure out why my brand new iPhone 5 is burning through battery life like a politician through public funding, when I noticed a process running called sandboxd

I wonder if it is the sandbox which is causing problems on the phone as well.

Well, I have a lot of experience with bugs, and often it's more complicated than your description. Most bugs I come across are multi-layered in that it actually takes more than one "oopsies" for a bug to occur. This "fix" is a hack work around for the problem. None of us knows what the problem really is, or what the real fix is.

When mdworker was hung on the sandbox cache db, CPU usage was LOWER than it should have been. mds should have been busy but wasn't, and should have spawned one or more very busy mdworkers but they were all idle. So I'm not sure these things are related.

Commonalities?

Among you:

1. do you have a drive that is partitioned?

2. Where you a Mobile Me user?

2a. And if you where a MM user, did you have more than one account (family pack)?

In my case

1. do you have a drive that is partitioned? - No

2. Where you a Mobile Me user? - No

2a. And if you where a MM user, did you have more than one account (family pack)? - NA

1. do you have a drive that is partitioned? yes - boot drive is on a partitioned drive

2. Where you a Mobile Me user? Yes

2a. And if you where a MM user, did you have more than one account (family pack)? No, but I have multiple Apple ID's

Hi to the 3d.

Last night, after indexing success in my MacBook Pro, I performed all the same procedures for deleting /var/folders/*, reboot and re-index my iMac.

The first time I launched indexing (as I wrote in one of my previous post, before Christopher discovered), this toke 3 full days, but it was successfully completed.

This time it was faster, 15 hours, but not as fast as MacBook (half an hour with a lot more of data!!).

I think it depends because in iMac I've 2 users profiles, in fact process monitor showed that there were 3 "mdworker" process (and 4 mds, one more for root):

1 for my user (admin)

1 for other user (logically...)

1 for _spotlight

The 3 processes often slept (no CPU activity) and still before the end (95% status bar 1 hour to left), there were 2 mdworker process under my user, and this I think is strange... (one was hang up?)

Also for me the problem will be find by Apple in Lion 107.5 because in the previous patch I've rebuilt entire spotlight DB more than one time, but I don't remember about slow indexing or TM Backup problems.

Does anyone have notice about this problem in Mountain Lion?

Commonalities?

1. do you have a drive that is partitioned?

Odd and seems to not correlate at all. a.) Everyone has partitioned drives. Snow Leopard and older, you have at least 2 partitions for Intel Macs. For Lion and newer you have at least 3 partitions. b.) The partition table is tiny, read contiguously into memory and never accessed again; it isn't changed by upgrading to 10.7.5 or 10.8.2.

I had not realized that EVERYONE'S Drives were all ready partitioned! So why does that not show up in Disk Utility? I mean if it were "Physically" partiioned would'nt it show up there as two or three storage locations?

Are you saying that invisible partition(s) exist on everyone's drives since SL ("and older")? And you are also saying that these invisble partitions behave the same way as a manual partitions, and more importantly are TREATED AND RECOGNIZED the same way by the system and it's apps, like say...Spotlight and Time-machine?

All Intel Mac have (U)EFI firmware, which requires an EFI System partition. This partition is hidden. There's no reason it needs to be visible because it relates to the firmware and bootloaders, and isn't considered user domain. Same for the Recovery HD partition that appeared with Lion. It's a hidden partition, users aren't meant to interact with the contents directly.

I don't know what you mean by "physically" partitioned or "manual" partitions.

The entries of all of these partitions in the GPT are very normal and usual entries, it's just that Disk Utility, and diskarbitrationd recognize these partitions (by virtue of their partition type GUIDs) to not be made visible or mounted.

Oh and Spotlight and Time Machine aren't even partition aware. They only care about JHFS+/X volumes.