This is driving me nuts, and I cannot find any way to fix it!
I have an external Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 SSD (Mac OS Extended Journaled) hooked up to my 2020 iMac. Since I upgraded to Ventura, it's as if the file indexing is no longer fully working on this drive. The symptoms looks like this:
After a reboot, folders with many files takes a long time to list/show up in Finder. I get a "Loading" message in the Finder window until it's done listing the files. This takes several seconds; the more files, the longer time. If I close the window and open a new one where I navigate to the same folder, the files are displayed immediately with no delay as expected. This is all good, until I reboot and do the same thing.
If I navigate to a problematic folder in a file browser, for example File -> Open..., in any application, I get the same behaviour with a long delay while it loads the list of files. If I close the file browser and open it again right away without closing the application, the same issue occurs every single time.
It doesn't matter what kind of files there are in the folder either. I've tested both with the files I already have and by generating hundreds of 0 bytes files to a folder.
What I've tried, to no avail:
I can see that indexing is indeed running when initiated, both from the CPU usage of the process in Activity Manager and that it actually says Indexing when opening Spotlight. Also, the .Spotlight-V100 folder is recreated as expected.
But still the system (Finder, I guess) behaves as if there's no index to read when listing folders for the first time after boot and every time when opening a file browser from an application. Reading/writing (2500/1900 MB/s) to the volume is as fast as it's always been. And the System volume shows none of these issues at all.
I'm running out of ideas here. Anyone else got any suggestions?
I have an external Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 SSD (Mac OS Extended Journaled) hooked up to my 2020 iMac. Since I upgraded to Ventura, it's as if the file indexing is no longer fully working on this drive. The symptoms looks like this:
After a reboot, folders with many files takes a long time to list/show up in Finder. I get a "Loading" message in the Finder window until it's done listing the files. This takes several seconds; the more files, the longer time. If I close the window and open a new one where I navigate to the same folder, the files are displayed immediately with no delay as expected. This is all good, until I reboot and do the same thing.
If I navigate to a problematic folder in a file browser, for example File -> Open..., in any application, I get the same behaviour with a long delay while it loads the list of files. If I close the file browser and open it again right away without closing the application, the same issue occurs every single time.
It doesn't matter what kind of files there are in the folder either. I've tested both with the files I already have and by generating hundreds of 0 bytes files to a folder.
What I've tried, to no avail:
- Unmounting/remounting the volume.
- First Aid in the Disk Utility (nothing to fix).
- The recommended way of re-indexing (adding and then removing a path from the Spotlight Privacy UI).
- Stopping/starting indexing on the volume from the terminal (mdutil -i off/on on the volume)
- Stopping/starting indexing completely in the terminal (mdutil -a -i on/off)
- Stopping the indexing, removing the hidden .Spotlight-V100 folder on the volume, and then starting the indexing again.
- Stopping the indexing on the volume, unmounting and mounting it (which triggers indexing automatically).
I can see that indexing is indeed running when initiated, both from the CPU usage of the process in Activity Manager and that it actually says Indexing when opening Spotlight. Also, the .Spotlight-V100 folder is recreated as expected.
But still the system (Finder, I guess) behaves as if there's no index to read when listing folders for the first time after boot and every time when opening a file browser from an application. Reading/writing (2500/1900 MB/s) to the volume is as fast as it's always been. And the System volume shows none of these issues at all.
I'm running out of ideas here. Anyone else got any suggestions?
Last edited:
So something is really f-ed up here.
