Q: Mavericks: Spotlight Indexing Forever!

I have this issue with a new Macbook Pro that I sue migration assistant on to transfer to the new drive. Spotlight never started, so after a few days I put the drive in privacy, then took it away, and it started the "Estimating Indexing Time". It's been doing that for days now.

If I look at Activity Monitor I see mds and mdsStore but no mdsworker....?

Thanks this worked for me.  Since installing Mavericks Spotlight would not stop indexing.  I removed my StorEdge card and Spotlight indexed my HD.  Spoltlight now works fine even after re-installing my StorEdge Card.

Thanks for your tip.

Did you find a solution? I have the same problem and it looks isolated to mail (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5647770?start=15&tstart=0)

For what it's worth, I filed a bugreport with apple about this issue shortly after mavericks came out.  I've sent them oodles of data, but it seems like it is a hard thing for their engineers to pin down.

You can file you own bugreport at bugreport.apple.com.  You can reference my bug ID # 15431895 as being similar.  Perhaps having the additional information will help their engineers get to the bottom of the issue.

The troubleshooting process they have me doing is running the terminal command "mddiagnose", piping the results to a file, zipping the file, and then uploading it to the bugreport site, anytime I'm having the problem (it's intermittant for me).  If someone is having the problem continuously, you might have even better data for them to mine thru to find the problem.

Here is the syntax of mddiagnose...

$ sudo mddiagnose -f <log_file_name>

I sent a bugreport in mid-December, since then I have not heard anyone despite my reminders citing the fact that I have the IMac KO that I need to work .... Let's hope so..

Hi everyone.

My IMAC: Late 2009: 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Has always worked like a charm, even under multiple duress. i.e. PhotoShop, Numbers, Several browsers and many multiple tabs, ICQ, Skype, Time Machine, downloads, Preview, etc, etc

Crashes were months between each other at most. (so hardly ever).

After installing Maverick, I have had crashes more and more often. Yesterday and today, crashes were every few mins.

After reading this particular thread and others, I have seen many issues with Maverick, including Spotlight, where Spotlight tries to index external devices (and possibly network ones), creating a heavy load with mdworker, etc - I personally have a TB time machine back up drive and a TB external drive as a second back up (manually).

Until Apple releases their fix (been almost 4 months now - whaaat?) - I have placed these drives in the privacy area of the Spotlight preferences and now, no crashes, no spotlight havoc. Fixed.

I also saw, that once this was done and Maverick has the time to adequately index your MAC alone (no external drives or devices), then you can begin adding them one by one until everything is indexed.

At anyrate, Apple needs to get on this ASAP.

Thoughts? Opiniones?

The command  

sudo mdutil -a -i off

on the terminal stopped indexing for me.

The command  

sudo mdutil -a -i off

on the terminal stopped indexing for me.

I guess my problem is slightly different in that I actually *want* it to index so that I can actually use Spotlight to find things!  Turning mdutil off isn't a great option here.

Also, I don't actually know if it ever starts indexing for real, mine is stuck "Estimating indexing time" and never actually indexes the drive. It's been estimating for nearly a month now.

There is a bug/issue with either spotlight search or Mail App in Mavericks where spotlight constantly crashes (an "mds" service crashes and you can see that in Console if you are affected). If you know someone who has signed up for the developer program they can download the beta of this update (build 13C44 is the latest at the time of writing)... I had this issue since mavericks came out and I called them a week later and have had support cases for a few months - apple never recognized this issue nor did they tell me about this upcoming patch which I find disgusting.

Good luck.

<Edited By Host>

And 'disgusting even for the fact that I posted describing how to apply a solution, but my post was promptly deleted ... With Apple

Let's see if I remove that too and then you'll see all Apple products that we have family that will happen .... Shame on you, if this is added to the product that justifies the price difference with the competition ....

I deleted all .* files from the disk which should be indexed, that are .Spotlight-V100, .TemporaryItems, ._.apdisk, ._.TemporaryItems, .apdisk. After that spotlight stared anew right away and indexed perfectly. To delete the files, I use muCommander. I tried this with several external disks.

Thanks tylerbell.

It worked for me.

I excluded my Time Machine  WD Hard drive in Spotlight.

Now running much faster and my hard drive is not constantly running.

Where are .Spotlight-V100, .TemporaryItems, ._.apdisk, ._.TemporaryItems, .apdis located?

thank you!

The following terminal command will rebuild all spotlight indices.  No need to futz around loking for V100 files to delete.

$ sudo mdutil -Ea

That's it.