Mojave Finder search stalls and other problems?

[Ph.D.]

Hello,

The Finder on my Mojave-equipped iMac has, for months, experienced periodic stalls and other problems. For example, searching for a file name, or any search, will yield nothing (just a permanent wait), and other mysterious problems such as files appearing corrupted when launching them into an application via clicking on the file in the finder.

Restarting the Finder (or a reboot) immediately and completely fixes all of these problems until some random point in time a week or whatever later.

Does anyone have any insight into this? It never happened before Mojave, at least frequently enough to notice.

 

[Honza1]

Spotlight index or some other cache/index may be corrupted. I would download OnyX (free) and run Maintenance scripts from there. It rebuilds macOS databases and cache and cleans the system. You can run these rebuilds manually, but OnyX makes this easy to do for complete novices.
It should be safe to run (but make backup anyway). Since it rebuilds Spotlight index and Mailbox indexes, it will take serious times.