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Spotlight calculator is slow

A

assquatch

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 22, 2021
104
67
I depend on spotlight a lot but it's gotten frustrating. My two main issues:

1. I like to use it as a calculator, especially when dealing with longer formulas with parenthesis. Lately it seems to not recognize math, and I'll have to delete and re-add characters or sometimes way 5-6s to see the answer. Almost feels like it's blocking on some network calls.

2. Sometimes I type the name of an app exactly and it ranks something else at the top. Commonly the preferences for something with the same name. it then Re-ranks after a short pause and I've pressed enter on the wrong thing because it changed last second or failed to find the obvious thing.

If anyone has had the same experience I'd be interest to know, and even better if you've got a suggestion to improve it. I'm on an M1 Mac mini with Monterey but had the same experience on my i7 with Big Sur.
 
My formulas aren't especially long so I'm not experiencing any lag. If you'd like to paste in one or two of your formulas, I can test whether it's the same lag on my M1 Mac Mini with Monterey.

I don't use it commonly to find apps, but just tested it with a few and all came up as the first choice.
 
I've had the same on Monterey, but found that if you leave out the spaces, it works fast again:

  • 1024 * 15 => very slow / sometimes not even a response
  • 1024*15 => instant
This is definitely a change from Big Sur to Monterey, as I use Spotlight for quick calculations almost daily, and noticed this the day after upgrading.
 
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MacReality said:
I've had the same on Monterey, but found that if you leave out the spaces, it works fast again:

  • 1024 * 15 => very slow / sometimes not even a response
  • 1024*15 => instant
This is definitely a change from Big Sur to Monterey, as I use Spotlight for quick calculations almost daily, and noticed this the day after upgrading.
Click to expand...
I have this problem and this did not help. Very simple calculations take a few seconds, used to be instantaneous in Big Sur.
 
MacReality said:
I've had the same on Monterey, but found that if you leave out the spaces, it works fast again:

  • 1024 * 15 => very slow / sometimes not even a response
  • 1024*15 => instant
This is definitely a change from Big Sur to Monterey, as I use Spotlight for quick calculations almost daily, and noticed this the day after upgrading.
Click to expand...
Hi! Tried it on Monterey (12.0.1) and there's no difference with spaces or without them. I'd suggest to rebuild the spotlight, maybe that will help to speed things up
 
appltech said:
Hi! Tried it on Monterey (12.0.1) and there's no difference with spaces or without them. I'd suggest to rebuild the spotlight, maybe that will help to speed things up
Click to expand...
This is the only thing that has worked for me with Monterey 12.0.1. However, I have to do it everyday; it's been 3 days since I upgraded and I'm 3 for 3 in having to do the rebuild. Once the indexing has finished if I bring up Spotlight and hit ESC, it stops working again.
 
appltech said:
Hi! Tried it on Monterey (12.0.1) and there's no difference with spaces or without them. I'd suggest to rebuild the spotlight, maybe that will help to speed things up
Click to expand...
Spaces or no spaces did nothing for me. I wanted to try this solution, so I prevented Spotlight from searching the entire harddrive, by adding it to the privacy section. Immediately the calculator was faster than ever. When the index was rebuilt, it was slow again.

This has a definate feel of Apple making the product slower, to sell their newer laptops.
 
Rasmis said:
Spaces or no spaces did nothing for me. I wanted to try this solution, so I prevented Spotlight from searching the entire harddrive, by adding it to the privacy section. Immediately the calculator was faster than ever. When the index was rebuilt, it was slow again.

This has a definate feel of Apple making the product slower, to sell their newer laptops.
Click to expand...
Yeah nothing has worked for me. I did try creating a new fresh user account per Apple’s support and spotlight works fast as expected there, not sure what to make of that. I’ll probably do a fresh OS install when the new Monterey version gets released.
 
Rasmis said:
Spaces or no spaces did nothing for me. I wanted to try this solution, so I prevented Spotlight from searching the entire harddrive, by adding it to the privacy section. Immediately the calculator was faster than ever. When the index was rebuilt, it was slow again.
Click to expand...
bigcat said:
... I did try creating a new fresh user account per Apple’s support and spotlight works fast as expected there, not sure what to make of that. ...
Click to expand...

Two pieces of data I see here are:
- disabling the disk index completely makes Spotlight calculation faster.
- a newly created user account has fast Spotlight calculations.

The first item suggests that searching the disk index is what slows down calculations, as distinct from other Spotlight options, such as web searching. The second tells us that disk-index searches don't start out slow.

Taken together, these suggest to me that some setting or configurable parameter in the well-used account is different from the original value, and this leads to a slowdown in calculation.


A lot of system-wide settings are available to the command-line tool named 'defaults'. There may be graphical ways to examine and alter those settings, but the 'defaults' command can also access them.

Paste the following line into a Terminal window. It should produce some output text. If it doesn't, then press the RETURN key to tell it that it should run the command.
Code: 
defaults read com.apple.spotlight
Spaces must be present as shown. Spelling must be exactly as shown.

Once the output is produced in the Terminal window, you can do a drag-select to select it all, then ⌘C to copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into a reply here.

I don't know if this is the complete set of Spotlight settings, or whether there might be others. A command to find the word "spotlight" in all the available settings is this:
Code: 
defaults read | grep -i spotlight
The same rules for spaces and spelling apply.

To get all the 'defaults' settings into a text file on the Desktop, which you can open and search for the context of every "spotlight" word:
Code: 
defaults read >~/Desktop/All-defaults.txt
This may well be a multi-megabyte text file.

The output from one of these may offer some clues. In particular, it might be useful to compare the data from the well-used account's output to the newly created account's output, at each place where "spotlight" occurs.

EDIT

The command for managing Spotlight indexes is this:
Code: 
mdutil
If you type (or paste) just that command into a Terminal window, then it should output a list of options. Please do that, then copy and paste the output here. The options vary across OS versions, so it's always best to see what it knows.
 
Last edited:
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Thanks @chown33 for the detailed post. Updating to Monterey 12.1 has fixed this issue for me, at least for now. It's been running without issues for a couple of days now.
 
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