Spotlight frustrations + questions

[mainstreetmark]

Frustration:

mds takes up over 100 megs of my 1 gig of RAM. A tenth? As much as the kernel??!

Questsion:

Spotlight only seems to find useless crap, like a Safari page I visited 3 weeks ago, but nothing useful, such as a lost function. Just before posting this, I noticed that I can search for my PHP files by filename, but the content of those files are not index, so I can't actually search for function names or variable names.

How do I control what it DOES index, rather than just including folders that it does not. Is there a "PHP Plugin" or something? If it indexed my source code files, I might start using the silly thing.

 

[superbovine]

Frustration:

mds takes up over 100 megs of my 1 gig of RAM. A tenth? As much as the kernel??!

Questsion:

Spotlight only seems to find useless crap, like a Safari page I visited 3 weeks ago, but nothing useful, such as a lost function. Just before posting this, I noticed that I can search for my PHP files by filename, but the content of those files are not index, so I can't actually search for function names or variable names.

How do I control what it DOES index, rather than just including folders that it does not. Is there a "PHP Plugin" or something? If it indexed my source code files, I might start using the silly thing.

not exactly sure how it works but it uses meta data.
I usually use grep. you probably want a recursive grep which would be "grep -R" or just read the man file. I am sure if os x has it, and i am at work so i can't try it right now. however, if it doesn't you can do

find <path> -name <filenamepattern> | xargs grep <searchstring>

 

[mainstreetmark]

not exactly sure how it works but it uses meta data.
I usually use grep. you probably want a recursive grep which would be "grep -R" or just read the man file. I am sure if os x has it, and i am at work so i can't try it right now. however, if it doesn't you can do

find <path> -name <filenamepattern> | xargs grep <searchstring>

I'm well versed in grep and do use it, but Spotlight's supposed to make things easier. It's taking 10th of my wired memory, without returning value to me. I use QuickSilver to jump to all my addresses and files anyways, but I'm really trying to get value out of Spotlight, and indexing my PHP files would be ideal. Metadata? They're just plain text files, with a PHP extension. I need to tell Spotlight to index PHP as if they were TXT.

 

[lexfuzo]

Try this:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050514182520714

 

[mainstreetmark]

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050514182520714

That appears to be doing it, thanks.

(not a very Apple-like solution, but fortunately, XML and "The Terminal" doesn't scare me away)

 

[mainstreetmark]

Spotlight is taking up 125Megs of Real memory, versus the kernel_task only taking up 100M.

What a pain...