Spotlight Indexing Filling SSD

[the_ron]

Hi everyone,

I've been having issues with Spotlight and my Intel X25-M since upgrading to Lion last fall. Unfortunately, the 10.7.3 update seems to have made things worse. Under 10.7 to 10.7.2, the initial Spotlight indexing would go fine, but a few times a day I would notice my disk space rapidly decreasing (I usually try to keep ~20GB free) until a "your disk is running out of free space" window appeared. This would happen for a few days causing minor annoyance, until eventually Spotlight would stop indexing altogether. After a restart, the cycle would repeat.

Since upgrading to 10.7.3, I've had fewer re-indexing issues. However now when they occur, they cause all open programs to freeze and a new dialog window appears asking me to select programs to force quit to clear up disk space.

This problem appeared on both my 2009 13" Macbook Pro and my current 2011 15" after swapping the drive. I've upgraded the firmware on the SSD to the latest version without any relief. When I run Repair Disk Permissions in Disk Utility after a crash, it finds problems in Library, Application Support, Contextual Menu Items, and Quicklook.

Does anyone have some insight into what might be causing this?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

My guesses are, based on the symptoms reported:

• One of Spotlight's indexes is corrupted
• A data file Spotlight is trying to index is repeatedly failing
• File system damage

All of these are easy to look for.
The first 2 can be identified from your Console logs - search for "md".
The 3rd can be ruled out (or in) with a Verify Disk operation in Disk Utility.