Q: Spotlight search keeps reindexing and not working

Hi there,

Thanks for the comment. What are you asking me to do though? find "mdworker" in all the log files? (not sure what the mdutil command is for in this case and what digits to paste in as argument). FYI only the "powerstats" log file (looked only under /Library/Logs) contains the word "mdworker" (see below).

I did stumble onto something from your suggestion though.. my "powerstats" process crashes too (only really that one and the mds_stores - ocasionally another one or two but 85% mds_stores and 15% powerstats).

Thanks in advance for any further comments, insights, suggestions etc..

Cheers,

Daniel

I think I may have resolved this, but fingers crossed and lets see (18 hours and counting)..

Basically I went into spotlight and excluded everything except for a couple of mailboxes and/or folders inside ~/Library/Mail/V2 and it calmed everything down. Its hard to find out what exactly caused it because I did this a while back and the symptom happened shortly (~ day) after again.

I'm guessing maybe there are some corrupt mails bu not sure. Will update the post later on so others can hopefully get some benefits out of this as well.. Its only been 3 or so months without proper search I suspect that Mavericks Mail App or Spotlight is a piece of crap - were is the defensive coding that prevents the whole index to blow up!!?

Nevermind, this piece of poo Spotlight has stopped working again ..

None of the messages in the console had the triangle and mdutil commands under it (there were only a couple of messages that could be expanded via the triangle icon).

Any other ideas anyone?

Thanks,

Daniel

NB: Has anyone resulted to trying to use a non-Spotlight-based desktop search tool of any kind and what is the experiences?

Hi there Duncan,

I've incidentally got a few Apple Support cases for this issue over the time (I think the system created a new one every time) but the last one with the most data, history, info and experiments is 541648142 and it was created mid Deecmber so you could refer to that.

The spotlight crashes was in my console it is the mds_stores process that keeps crashing.

I think Microsoft Outlook for Mac doesn't have this issue (maybe its more robust and transactional as well and doesn't stall as much as Mail App either) - would be worth a test I think. But it would be pretty bad if we had to buy that just because Apple's stuff doesn't work (and I'd think MS Outlook wouldn't be clever with PowerNap mail fetching either which was something I was looking forward to using in the future on a newer machine)..

If it does turn out that Microsoft Office Outlook for Mac is the most robust for mails then here are cheap sourcing options (depending on what you qualify for);

- Academic license for students: http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/itsnotcheating/default.aspx

  - Home User Program (HUP): http://www.microsofthup.com/

  - BizSpark (for startups): http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

- Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dsoftware&field-keywo rds=microsoft+office+2011+for+mac+%22home+and+business%22&rh=n%3A229534%2Ck%3Ami crosoft+office+2011+for+mac+%22home+and+business%22

Anyone else have any thoughts or ideas on how we can fix this Spotlight / Mail App issue/symptom?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Daniel

Wonder if the upcoming patch OS X Mavericks 10.9.2 Build 13C39 fixes this, any ideas?

Det lyder godt Henrik!

Let's see what comes out of that, fingers crossed!! Funny that over my 3 months of working with Apple Support on this and lots of reinstalls and experiments and data captures I was never asked to run "mddiagnose"! :-|

Lets see. In the meantime, anyone that has any updates for the rest of us (or even ideas) that would be great to hear.

Cheers,

Daniel