spotlight indexing has been going on for hours...

[anikgol]

it once did index, using 30 mins and i restarted after that after repairing permissions. now its indexing again! has been calculating time for many minutes now. is it normal??? that spotlight indexes this much??

 

[James Philp]

tell me, why did you re-start!?
How many gigs of files do you have?

 

[mkrishnan]

On an iBook G4, with about 35 megs of total files (about 20-25 in the Home dir), it took less than a half for Spotlight to index completely, IIRC. No, this isn't normal. After the first index, unless you force re-indexing, it should not do a full re-index, even if you reboot and/or repair permissions, update prebindings, update software, etc.

I don't have any help for you, sadly, but it doesn't sound right. Even if you have a much larger hard drive (which will also doubtless be much faster than mine!), the reboot and re-index part is not right.

EDIT: You don't have anti-virus software installed, do you? If you do, uninstall it, and put it on the ground and jump up and down on top of it, and then light it on fire. Some of the packages, esp. Virex, can really screw Spotlight / Tiger up.

 

[anikgol]

no i dont have any virus apps or anything like that. it looks like the forever indexing has stopped and the system works great! (after a horrible mail message importing incident) ive got a imac 700mhz 256 ram and a 60 gig HD with 8 gigs available..

i dont have the ripple effect and all the eye candy and i dont need them either.. i just wish dashboard could be turned off.

IF I WANT TO KNOW THE WEATHER, I LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!!

 

[anikgol]

i did restart to see how it went. if the system started up ok and all. fixed permissions and then did a restart to start a "better life".