Spotlight's insistence on thrashing my hard drive and slowing my Mac to a crawl bugs the heck out of me, and seemingly many others. On the other hand, I do genuinely find Spotlight useful.
So I'd like to tell it to update the indexes daily, at a time of my choosing, rather than at a time of its own choosing (usually when I'm trying to do something important). I can survive without being able to search for files I downloaded four hours ago... I should be able to remember where they are. 😉
I've tried adding this to the root crontab:
15 0 * * * mdutil -a -i on
0 8 * * * mdutil -a -i off
In other words, turn indexing on at 00.15am, and back off at 08.00am.
Unfortunately, this appears to make Spotlight completely unusable during "off" hours, and force a complete re-index when it's turned back on. All I want to do is stop mds/mdworker from running during the day, not disable Spotlight entirely.
Any thoughts? I guess I could do something hacky like symlinking mds and mdworker to a script that checks the time and quits if it's an "off" time, but there should be a more elegant way of doing it.
So I'd like to tell it to update the indexes daily, at a time of my choosing, rather than at a time of its own choosing (usually when I'm trying to do something important). I can survive without being able to search for files I downloaded four hours ago... I should be able to remember where they are. 😉
I've tried adding this to the root crontab:
15 0 * * * mdutil -a -i on
0 8 * * * mdutil -a -i off
In other words, turn indexing on at 00.15am, and back off at 08.00am.
Unfortunately, this appears to make Spotlight completely unusable during "off" hours, and force a complete re-index when it's turned back on. All I want to do is stop mds/mdworker from running during the day, not disable Spotlight entirely.
Any thoughts? I guess I could do something hacky like symlinking mds and mdworker to a script that checks the time and quits if it's an "off" time, but there should be a more elegant way of doing it.