El Capitan - Spotlight Indexes On Every Boot

[jblagden]

I have a late 2011 13” MacBook Pro with a 480 gigabyte Solid State Drive 8 gigabytes of RAM and a GT 740 eGPU.

Every time my Mac boots, spotlight indexes my Solid State Drive. The indexing process runs for a 10-20 or so and affects the launch time of Mail and Messages, which are the first apps I launch every day.

How do I fix this?

 

[beebarb]

I've seen people suggest manually running the maintenance scripts can help.
If I recall correctly, you enter

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

in Terminal.

Though to me it seems like the index could be corrupted.
Maybe adding the affected drive to the privacy tab in spotlight preferences to purge the current index, then removing it a moment later to rebuild the index will help.

 

[Fishrrman]

Do what I did:
Kill Spotlight by turning it off and deleting the indexes.

I use EasyFind and/or Find Any File (along with DevonThink) for when I need to find stuff. They work great.

Spotlight?
Good riddance!

 

[jblagden]

Do what I did:
Kill Spotlight by turning it off and deleting the indexes.

I use EasyFind and/or Find Any File (along with DevonThink) for when I need to find stuff. They work great.

Spotlight?
Good riddance!

How did you turn Spotlight off?

 

[Alrescha]

How did you turn Spotlight off?

You can turn Spotlight off by either: opening Spotlight/Privacy in System Preferences and adding your drive to the exclusion list, or you can start up Terminal and type in:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

On the other hand, if you like being able to use Spotlight, you might try some things before you give up. I had some annoying problems with Spotlight with my initial install of El Capitan, and I solved them by simply doing a re-install over my existing system. It took a while, but it worked.

A.

 

[KALLT]

sudo mdutil -a -i off

I am curious, mdutil also has the option -d which “disables searching”. Applying it will also disable the indexing. Do you know what happens when you just turn off the indexing, but leave the searching enabled?

 

[Alrescha]

Do you know what happens when you just turn off the indexing, but leave the searching enabled?

I do not know what the intended behavior is, but in my experience Spotlight gets pretty useless if you turn off indexing. It was worth a re-install of OS X to get everything working - pretty much every one of my tasks begins with Command-space.

A.