Q: Mavericks: Spotlight Indexing Forever!

The same, it did not help.

Me too.  Started out saying a few hours remaining.  2 days later, and now says 2 days remaining.

I tried re-building all indexes using "sudo mdutil -Ea".

No improvement.

I have the opposite problem.

Spotlight doesn't appear to be indexing at all in Mavericks for me.

Even after backing up 100GB + Spotlight didn't indicate it was indexing for even a few seconds.

Yet Spotlight still appears to work.

Go figure.

Tja, und auch in Deutschland gibt es dieses Problem. Auch mein MacBook Air rödelt immerzu mit spotligt rum seitdem ich auf Maverick bin. Vorher gab es diese Probleme nicht.

Spätestens 2-4 Minuten, nachdem der Mac aus dem Standby erwacht ist geht es wieder los und ist durch nichts zu stoppen.

@Apple: Es wird unbedingt Zeit ein Update nachzuschieben. Das ist ein Serienfehler, irgendwo in Maverick ist ein gewaltiger Bug!

Konkret sieht es die meiste Zeit so aus:

Having the same issue and really dont want to resort to time machine... anyone else have any thoughts - going on my second week of indexing and beachballs....

I had the same problem with mds_stores consuming all of my CPU.  I moved my 2 external drives plus Dropbox drive to Privacy and the problem seems to be gone.  Spotlight was constantly estimating the time to Index one of my external drives that was causing the issue.

I have the same problem: intermittent re-indexing without any sign of it finishing. It seems random and unnecessary and I think it kills my battery life.

On other forums, other people are having the same issue of non-stop indexing. The solution was to remove SD cards. Everytime they turned their computer on, it would re-index everytime. I hope this can help someone!

What do you mean by "remove their SD cards"?  Please explain.

For me, it is happening on an iMac that has been on 24/7 since I installed mavericks. Only peripheral is a time machine disk.

Sorry about being so vague earlier. This is what i was refering to.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23591747#23591747

SvenGPS said:

"This solved it for me:

I had this same issue, although it wasn't affecting my system performance too much it, it was constantly trying to index with a long or indeterminate amount of time until completion.

This issue went away when I added my 32GB SD card to the Privacy tab exclusion list under Spotlight Preferences. I have it inserted almost permanantly, as soon as I added it to the list, Spotlight stopped with the repeated indexing.

Don't know if this is a bug with external drives, or just that my sd card has a large amount (a few thousand) files on it, but its solved my problem for now."

Same here, even if I put all external drives and many folders of my internal HDD on the privacy list, I still run out of memory due to mds consuming all of it (32GB!).  I had to completely turn off Spotlight to be able to work.  Please, Apple, fix this soon!

Same problem, but I have not installed Mavericks! Problem started when I installed Safari 6.1, iTunes 11.1.3, and Remote Desktop Client Update 3.7.0.  No external drives connected and Spotlight is showing 8 hours to go.  I agree, Apple please fix this soon!

This morning, I turned off Norton Antivirus.  Left the machine to sit all day. 

Came home this evening, and all Spotlight indexing is done, and TimeMachine has completed multiple backups (on the hour).  Looks like I'm good to go now.

Turned Norton Antivirus back on.  We'll see if things stay good now that indexing is complete.

Update.  After several good backups, turned Norton back on.  Came back two hours later, and spotlight is back to "estimating..." and no timemachine backups have completed.

There is also chatter on the Norton website community about this issue (community.norton.com).  Perhaps we have a culprit?

http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-for-Mac/Turn-off-Norton-in-order-to-do-a-T ime-Machine-Backup/td-p/1045627

http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-for-Mac/After-updating-to-OS-X-10-9-symdae mon-using-90-CPU/td-p/1041171

http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-for-Mac/NAV-Mac-v12-6-creating-a-Baziilion -small-files-WHICH-THEN-HAVE/td-p/1039065