Spotlight speed problem

[miknos]

Spotlight in 10.6 was much faster and responsive than Lion.

Before I could press Command+Spacebar and start typing and the results started appearing as I typed. It was perfectly smooth. Now It is (a little) sluggish. It's not as responsive.

Everything is already indexed and I upgraded from Snow Leopard (It is not a clean install).

Could be because of the new Filevault2 (now it is whole disk encryption) affecting reading performance? In 10.6, FileVault encrypted only User's files. Maybe it is that?

I'm using a macbook early 2008 (2GB RAM, 160GB HD).

 

[miknos]

Little bump please.

 

[iWonderwhy]

Could be that, could also be that the quick-look integration into spotlight may have caused a bit of a slowdown, or could be that this is just a temporary bug and will be addressed in a forthcoming software update. Not sure.

A tip might be to try going to system preferences and select Spotlight, uncheck some categories that you don't find yourself searching for in Spotlight (i.e, I've unchecked Webpages, contacts, events & to-do items, and music.) It might help.

Personally, I haven't seem a difference in spotlight performance from SL to Lion on my end. Hope you get the issue resolved.

 

[Mrguidogenio]

Alfred is better.

 

[gr8tfly]

Try letting it index again. Add your HD to privacy list, then remove it. That will cause a new index to be created.

I find Lion's Spotlight speed dazzling, though I don't use Filevault. Though, I can't help but think that even with decrypting, the bottleneck is still the HD.

(I'm using a Seagate XT 7200RPM 500GB drive. I'm guessing your 160GB is 5400RPM, so I'll have a little speed advantage between the areal density increase and faster RPM. I don't think the XT's SSD will have much effect.)

 

[miknos]

It looks like improved a little bit but still slower than 10.6.

I guess it is FileVault.


I heard great things about Alfred but I prefer to install less applications that run in the background as possible. I use spotlight just to open apps I don't use often.

Thanks for the replies.
Cheers

 

[miknos]

Being using Alfred for a while and it works flawlessly. Searching is faster (doesn't lag) and configurable. It uses 11mb of my RAM so it doesn't slow my computer.

Wish I tried Alfred before.

 

[netnothing]

Being using Alfred for a while and it works flawlessly. Searching is faster (doesn't lag) and configurable. It uses 11mb of my RAM so it doesn't slow my computer.

Wish I tried Alfred before.

Just to chime in.....after upgrading to Lion....I also switched to Alfred. Main reason was Spotlight in SL would dynamically reorder apps based on if you opened it a lot. They removed this in Lion.

So I switched to Alfred and the powerpack. Haven't looked back.

It's small, fast and best of all, it uses the Spotlight index. It doesn't create it's own, so no extra index to maintain!

-Kevin