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funkahdafi

Suspended
Original poster
Mar 16, 2009
377
112
Planet Earth
Hi there,

I've been experiencing some really bad Spotlight behavior and I tried almost anything to solve it, but to no avail.

I first noticed the troubles when I found out that it wouldn't show me any search reasults for newly added files anymore. So I started investigating. Tried almost all of the suggested solutions out there in the forums. Resetting the index, deleting the index, removing drives from the indexing process one by one, resetting again, deleteing again... no matter what I do, I always end up with a dead Spotlight a couple of hours or days after the last reset.

What I can tell is that once I reset/re-index, I always have at least one "mdworker" and "mdworker32" process running. And for as long as they run, everything seems fine. But then after a while (usually a couple of hours after the last manual re-index) all mdworker processes just disappear. And once they are gone, I start all over again, because that's the moment Spotlight stops indexing new files.

I searched my logs but I usually don't find any entries that would suggest a crash or abnormal exit of the mdworker processes. They disappear silently.

My only solution right now is to almost daily do a "mdutil -E -a", which helps for a couple of hours or sometimes even a day, before I have to do that all over again.

So basically Spotlight has become useless to me, and after all the hours I already spent researching and troubleshooting and trying, I am willing to give up and do a clean install of my machine - which would be sad.

Maybe you guys can come up with some more troubleshooting and help me get this fixed, before I throw the towel.

Thanks

(oh - I forgot to mention that I also tried re-applying the 10.6.2 upgrade combo, but that didn't help either).
 
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