13/09/05
18Spotlight indexing considered chuffing annoying
Until recently, Omniweb 5 was running significantly slower on my G5 than my lesser spec-ed G4 Powerbook. It was snappy on the powerbook, but sluggish on the G5. Both machines have near-identical files, as they are daily kept in sync with Chronosync. I couldn’t see how the better spec Mac was so slow.
After a post I made to the Omniweb Mailing List about this, the culprit was found to be Spotlight. There seems to be a known bug, whereby OS X can can forget privacy settings for a removable firewire drive. Therefore, every morning when I attached my powerbook to my G5 via target disk mode for syncing, the system would start re-indexing the powerbook.
Stopping the indexing resulted in a much happier G5, and in particular the apps that were using the most CPU – Omniweb and Fireworks.
I’ve seen a few suggestions bandied about for this – but most involve disabling spotlight altogether. I actually find spotlight rather handy, so would prefer to keep this on. Another suggestion involved adding the drive name to a hidden preference file, but ‘Macintosh HD’ could cause some problems there.
If anyone has discovered a way around this – please let me know!
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akatsuki said 1091 days ago:
You could always get rid of the lame Macintosh HD name of your hard drive. :)Jon Hicks said 1091 days ago:
Thankyou for that.Chris said 1091 days ago:
But remember that when you change the disc’s name, some applications can lost paths in preferences (looking for ‘Macintosh HD’—i.e. Dreamweaver, AFAIK).Jon Hicks said 1091 days ago:
Which is exactly why I haven’t done it! Back in OS9 days I used to call my HD various wacky names, but it caused problems with files from other machines and gave up!Gary Yuen said 1091 days ago:
Use the Spotlight PreferencePane. Add Macintosh HD to the Privacy list.It’ll know it’s different since it’ll be /Volumes/Macintosh HD.
Should work even if your G5 and Powerbook HDs have the same name.
Jon Hicks said 1091 days ago:
Gary, I’m guessing you didn’t read the post properly then? Thats the point – the big means that the system forgets this preference.Simon said 1091 days ago:
Jon,Not the best solution I know, but you could always sync via a network connection. That’s provided that the Spotlight bug doesn’t extend to mounted network drives. If you’re syncing every day then I’m guessing the amount of data your syncing isn’t massive? And I’m guessing it doesn’t really matter how long the sync takes, within reason?
Poncho said 1091 days ago:
Hey Jon,I had a problem with Spotlight where I was synching to an always-connected FW drive. The system was giving me both local and external files, not so good.
I found this very nice little shell script and edited it so it enables or disables Spotlight for specific volumes. You will have to edit a few lines to replace “Macintosh\ HD” with your FireWire HD name.
toggle-spotlight
Original script from The Adventures of Systems Boy for all system volumes.
Owen said 1090 days ago:
Dreamweaver is the only app I’ve seen affected by changing the HD name, and that’s only while DW is running. A friend tells me there’s an Apple guideline for dealing with HD names that should alleviate your fears (but for DW having bugs…).Ethan said 1090 days ago:
Interesting—I’ve never sync’d my machines via Firewire. I’m sure my attention span’s paid the price as a result, but ChronoSync over my network has worked well enough for me. I haven’t encountered that Spotlight bug either, for what it’s worth.Best of luck, Jon. Hope you find a workaround…
Poncho said 1089 days ago:
Another notable mention should go to Macintouchmud said 1089 days ago:
Perhaps this might help? From the Mac Gems weblog:Various tweaks and incantations for fixing this problem are floating around the Web, but the solution I’ve settled on is Fixamac Software’s $8 Spotless 2.0, which gives you per-volume control over Spotlight indexing. Choose a mounted volume from the pop-up menu, and Spotless displays its current indexing status (Enabled or Disabled); the status of the current Spotlight index for the volume (Yes, Partial, or No); and the total size of the volume’s index (a surprisingly large 429MB for my boot volume). You can choose to permanently disable indexing for a volume by clicking the Disable Indexing button, and the Delete Index button will delete the existing index to free up some space.
Once you disable Spotlight indexing for a volume, it remains disabled, even if you disconnect and reconnect the drive. (In fact, even if you connect the drive to a different Mac!) The only way to re-enable indexing for the drive is to do so using Spotless—or to erase the drive, which will delete all Spotlight settings for that drive.
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macgems/2005/09/spotless/index.php
systemsboy said 1089 days ago:
Jon,Try this:
sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/YourFireWireDrive
That does what “Privacy” is supposed to do, and it should be permanent, at least it has been for me.
To reverse:
sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/YourFireWireDrive
systemsboy
systemsboy said 1089 days ago:
Oh yeah, and thanks to Poncho for the cred. The actual site is here:http://systemsboy.blogspot.com/
The Blogsome site was a test.
systemsboy
Shawn said 1089 days ago:
If spotlight won’t index network drives then you could use that to your advantage and still do an FW connection. In the network preferences pane you can set up Firewire networking.I imagine that if both your machines have FW-800 you could probably have quite the fast hook up there…
Alexis said 1089 days ago:
I have this same problem and for now Spotless seems to have fixed this.Neil said 1088 days ago:
If you’re using SuperDuper! to do your backups (which I believe you are? I could be wrong) they have a script you can add on at the end of the sync to automatically turn Spotlight off on your firewire drive. Once I’ve added this in, I have had zero issues with Spotlight indexing.The other thing to remember is if you want to add something to Spotlight’s Privacy tab, Spotlight needs to have completely indexed it at least once before it can be added.
Here’s the link to the SuperDuper! script
Neil said 1088 days ago:
Oh, duh. Sorry, I should have actually read the post. I use Chronosync, too – you might be able to use this script with CS also as I seem to remember there is an option for post-sync scripts.