I think Spotlight is slowing down my computer. What can I do?

Two ways of doing this:

1. Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > + and select the entire disk. This will disable the indexing process for your local disk. You can also do this to any connected external or remote disks.

2. To completely disable Spotlight, go to Applications > Utilities > Terminal and paste the following command:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

and press return. You will be prompted for your administrator password (but will not see any characters as you type it in). If you don't have a password set, just press return again. It's then a good idea to restart your Mac.

Something else to try would be...

1.) limiting where Spotlight indexes (but not the entire disk), as this will limit the amount of work that Spotlight has to do.

2.) Clear the Spotlight index. Sometimes the index gets corrupted or bloated, and this can decrease Spotlight's performance and cause it to re-index the entire drive more often than necessary. Again in Terminal, enter sudo mdutil -E /

If you disabled Spotlight through the Terminal command I posted earlier, also enter

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

and then restart your Mac

Note that this will cause Spotlight to reindex the entire drive, so you will get the sluggishness you are trying to avoid, but it should mitigate it in the future.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.

Once you add the drive to Privacy, remove it from privacy and it will completely reindex. Once done with the initial index, you should not see it index that drive again. New files are indexed on the fly. If it is indexing periodically, the index is likely corrupt.

Also the App Store relies on Spotlight for providing info about updated apps, so it's probably not a good idea to disable it on your Macintosh HD. If you have any external drives though, you could add those to Privacy.

However, once Spotlight has fully indexed your drive it shouldn't be slowing things down. How much RAM do you have installed, and do you use any anti-virus software?

Thanks much, this resolved my slowness & frequent beachball issue (MBP mid 2012 - Mac Os Sierra)

Kudos to you.

I am screaming in happiness, My one week of time was really stressful and finally i got relief.