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10.4: Improve Spotlight's search speed
Authored by: bigbold on May 10, '05 11:44:45AM

How amusing! I've done the same thing, but in the OPPOSITE direction! mds is a nightmare. It seems to want to balloon up to using 65MB of memory sometimes, and I have to killall -HUP mds, which knocks it back down to single digit land for a while. Then I give up and renice it up ;-) Still, I now want to find a way to disable this nonsense since I'm sick of mds, mdimport, and friends taking up my CPU time and memory space. Tiger is so memory hungry it's nuts.



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10.4: Improve Spotlight's search speed
Authored by: cynikal on May 10, '05 12:02:29PM

Not to mention I/O.. when mds kicks up, it will slow your hard drive reading/writing to a halt as it churns its way through your files..

Shame that a new user's first few hours of using tiger, they will get the impression that tiger is so slow as a result of mds



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10.4: Improve Spotlight's search speed
Authored by: bigbold on May 10, '05 04:27:41PM

I've been using Tiger for just over a week now and mds still usually ends up at 64MB or so each day. If I HUP it, it sits at 5MB for a while, then climbs back up.

There's certainly way more paging on in Tiger than ever before (which is probably why it feels so awfully sluggish). I bought 512MB of memory which made Panther totally fly.. now it seems I'll have to buy a 1GB stick to get Tiger to do the same :-(

I'm a developer and am always untarring and compiling bits and pieces. I wonder if mds is getting tied up keeping up with all the files I'm creating. If so, perhaps I can set exceptions on my temporary and development folders to cure the problem..



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10.4: Improve Spotlight's search speed
Authored by: sjmills on May 10, '05 07:56:39PM

Since Spotlight doesn't even look at all the data files created/modified during a compile/build, it shouldn't being doing much. It will probably only scan the newly built app if that's what you're building.



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10.4: Improve Spotlight's search speed
Authored by: sveinbjornt on May 10, '05 05:51:29PM

Yeah, TIger is pretty memory hungry. The trick is to close all dashboard widgets and never open the bloody thing. Saves you about 60 megs.



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10.4: Improve Spotlight's search speed
Authored by: Synchro on May 11, '05 05:57:11AM

This is causing me trouble too. I'm on a dual G4/867 with 1.25Gb RAM, and the mdimport process is consuming 65Mb AND 65% of CPU all the time. It's been running for 7 days solid now and is credited with 124 hours of CPU usage - surely enough to index ~300Gb of files - I'm not introducing large numbers of files to my system. I just HUPd it and it dropped off the radar, but mds has now climbed to 75Mb and 75% CPU.

I'm not wildly impressed with spotlight in mail - it doesn't seem any faster than the old method.



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