Is there any terminal command to show what specific files Spotlight is indexing at the very moment? Since Mavericks I have the problem that Spotlight reindexes for some minutes after every start of my Mac and slows down the system. I would like to know which files are in concern.
Hi again,
Interesting issue !!
Have you been down this track?
During each of these steps, does Spotlight index less of /Applications
- Use Disk Utility to " Repair Disk Permissions "
- Then perform a Safe Boot : OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?
- Then reboot normally.
Cheers
Okay, I see that Spotlight reindexes the application folder every time the Mac is started. The question is, why? There aren't any changes in this folder. I have to dig deeper to find the cause. Thank you for the tip with opensnoop.
Take a look at System Preferences > Spotlight. Every category that you have checked will get indexed. If you have additional internal or external drives connected, these will get indexed — unless you added them to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy. My external Time Machine drive is in there.
Other than opensnoop, real-time viewing of the mdworker sub-process is not provided — probably for a practical reason.
- Since you identified that /Applications get re-indexed at boot time, try System Preferences ->Spotlight -> Privacy and add /Applications. ( suggestion by VikingOSX )
- Then reboot and check performance /stability.
Cheers
.
I did this several times already. I tried all tricks I know and had a two-hours talk with Apple Support. The only tip they could give me was to re-install the whole system. This is no option because it is my work computer and I don't have the time to do a clean install. Thank you anyway.
Yes, I did all that with the help of Apple support on the phone. I put all cache files into the trash, made a reboot, deleted them, made a reboot. Made a safe restart. Deleted caches. Disabled Spotlight at all and reenabled it again. Put the whole hard drive into the privacy tab. This mdutil thingy. Nothing helped. Because this issue occurs on three different computers with different setups since the upgrade to Mavericks, I assume this is caused by the system itself. Spotlight is not only indexing the Applications folder but several other locations, too. It is difficult to investigate. That's why I asked for an appropriate terminal command in my initial post.
I can see in Activity Monitor that the IconServiceAgent causes a lot hard drive activity as well. This and Spotlight make every startup chewy.
Could this be the reason? Disk Utility always reports wrong permissions on System/Library/Spotlight/CoreMedia.mdimporter, no matter how often I run the routine. It always reports a successful repair, which is wrong. This is the output:
Der Benutzer unterscheidet sich auf „System/Library/Spotlight/CoreMedia.mdimporter“, korrekt wäre 0, Benutzer ist jedoch 501.Gruppe unterscheidet sich auf „System/Library/Spotlight/CoreMedia.mdimporter“, korrekt wäre 0, Gruppe ist jedoch 20.„System/Library/Spotlight/CoreMedia.mdimporter“ wurde repariert
That certainly could be an issue.
You can fix it with Terminal. Copy/paste in this command into Terminal while logged in as an admin user:
sudo chown 0:0 /System/Library/Spotlight/CoreMedia.mdimporter
It will ask for your password. Enter it, but note that you will not see anything repeated back on the screen. Just type the password and hit return.
That will change the owner and group to the appropriate values. For some reason. It has the first user set up as owner.
It shouldn't be doing that every restart. Try, Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes
That will normally clean up a corrupted index or whatever is causing it to index every restart.
Try:
sudo mdutil -sa
sudo mdutil for a list of all options.
Cheers
Thank you but this command does not show which files are currently indexed.
Try:
open snoop -g | grep mdworker
open snoop -g | grep md for all mrs processes
check man opensnoop
A lot of lines appear when there is re-indexing
Cheers
These settings just hide those categories from the finding list but does not prevent Spotlight from indexing, as far as I know. The re-indexing still happens.
Do you want to reset the indexing?
sudo mdutil -E /
Yes, I did. It did not help. I even temporarily moved the Spotlight plugins out of Library/Spotlight and System/Spotlight just for testing purposes. Nothing helped.
terminal command to show what Spotlight is indexing?
