Q: Mavericks: Spotlight Indexing Forever!

I am having all the same issues after upgrading to Mavericks, turned off iCLoud for mail and contacts. hhhhhhmmmm no more indexing, no more beach balls. I turned mail and contacts back on and the system immediately started indexing again.

Thanks for posting those links. That's led me to the one solution to three separate problems that I was facing on several computers: 1) Time Capsule taking forever to prepare and back up each time, 2) Spotlight constantly re-indexing for hours at a time, and 3) Crashplan constantly scanning files and never reaching a complete back-up. The problem, as pointed out in those posts on the Norton board, was that Norton Antivirus idle-time scan has been creating tens of thousands of tiny files with each scan, creating a huge load for those three programs to sort through each time. Within minutes of turning off the idle time scan, Time Capsule returned to normal preparation and back-up speeds, Spotlight stopped indexing, and Crashplan reached a full back-up and returned to normal function. And so we need a fix to Norton Antivirus idle time scan, and it seems from the posts on the Norton board that they are aware of it and working on a fix.

OK,

1. Activivty Monitor - Force quit mdworker

2. Reboot

3. System Prefs > Spotlight > Privacy

     Add all your hard drives to prevent Spotlight from searching

4. Relaunch Finder

IT worked for me.

p.s. Try removing the hard drives you want to be search from step 3.

It seems to be taking forever for people with external hard drives / secondary hard drives and bootcamp drives.

Just hide those in the spotlight settings. Step 2.

I installed Mavericks on 2 2012 Minis with no issues.  I have no spotlight excluded drives on two different 2012 Minis and TM works fast.  No issues so not sure why some are having issues.  I expect some software icompatibilities.

For me same problem, since Mavericks, indexing seems to start every few days all over again, I suspect it is just bug.

This solved it for me - thank you tylerbell!

Had the same Problems: Mavericks, Spotlight showed "estimating time" forever, no indexing, ... Also had problems with Mail: search didn't work, my flagged messages weren't shown anymore...

Now it's indexing and the Mail problem is solved. Hope that's it and that it won't reoccure.

I had the same problem. Photoshop told me it was out of space, so I started digging. The Console was going crazy with the following error message "mdworker: (warning) Import: Bad path:". What's really bad is that I didn't notice I had a problem. I had so many error messages in the log that they took up 2.5TB. I had a couple gig available on my 3TB hard drive!. That's what I would call a big problem. I was able to delete the logs and free up some space while I dug into the problem. For me, its the Spotlight Indexing service and my external RAID array. Once I excluded the RAID, my Memory utilization dropped from 98% to 7% and things are good. Guess I shouldn't have upgraded to Mavericks.

I was having endless indexing ...

I realized after reading this thread that it was trying (unsuccesfully) to index my StorEdge 128GB (which is just a high speed SD card that sits flush against the edge of the SD slot).

I added it to exclusions under System Prefs => Spotlight => Privacy Tab and it immediately fixed the problem. I don't want it to index the StorEdge anyway!

Upgraded it a few weeks ago to mavericks. After a few hours it went completely crazy. It is so bad for me that I can't even get to the activity monitor to "kill" the processes. I have reinstalled mavericks to no avail.  All the icons have disappeared. I have been unable to work for the last three weeks. Does apple know that this is happening. They are awfully quiet. I feel like taking the computer to apple and just dumping it there....

Thanks on the tip of killing the md_worker process. Once I did that, the indexing started immediately.

I also suspect that the indexing was getting screwed up by the SD Card that I have on my Nifty MiniDrive on my MBP. Putting in on the Spotlight's exclusion list seems to help too.

This problem is now apparently solved.... BUT the logs you posted indicate a deeper lying source for the slow indexing:

10/28/13 8:26:12.000 PM kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error.

10/28/13 8:26:31.000 PM kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error.

Check if you still have those "I/O error" lines in /var/log/system.log - if so this very likely means your internal harddisk has bad blocks, and is no longer to be trusted, needs to be replaced!

It seems that you need the Spolight index for the correct functioning of Tags and Time Machine backups, amongst other things.  Excluding unnecessary partitions and disks helps and will prevent double entries in Finder Tag labels. 

I heard too, that this continual indexing may be caused by Dropbox updates (and maybe other internet downloads, Mail etc) when starting or waking the computer.