Why is searching so taxing on the processor?

[ThisBougieLife]

I go to Finder and I put something in the search bar and the fans on my MBP quickly go to max RPM as the entire system overheats. Why does searching cause as much system stress as 8K video rendering? This is not unique to the specific MBP I've had; I've noticed it on others and I'm sure it happens on the iMac as well. In fact, even on Windows 10 the search function is very slow and often doesn't fully finish. What is it about searching that really stresses a system? Is there any alternative that won't overheat my computer? I use it especially to find documents with certain phrases in them or pictures with certain tags.

 

[Analog Kid]

It's a matter of how much information you want to parse and how quickly you want to parse it. To search for content, Spotlight needs to know what is in every file on your drive. If it did this from scratch, it would need to read every file-- but the fact that Spotlight indexes your drive in advance means it only needs to check the index. The goal is to give you search results as quickly as possible, so the index file is structured to feed your processors efficiently and to run as much in parallel as possible. An SSD means the processors aren't waiting very long for data to arrive from the disk. So a lot of data, run in parallel, without waiting means your processor is running at full performance-- which is also maximum power consumption, and heat, and thus requires cooling.

The alternative would be to wait longer for the results, so the heat doesn't build up and doesn't require as much cooling-- but most of us want answers stat.

 

[leman]

Searching in many cases involves reading and looking though a large amount of data, which is not dissimilar to "8K video rendering" in principle And with a fast SSD, CPU does not have to wait for the data too long, so it doesn't have much opportunity to "rest".

As the above poster mentions, spotlight indexing is a technology used to speed up the searches. Spotlight checks the files in the background and maintains a database that can be searched more quickly and efficiently rather than scanning thousands of files directly. But this is not always applicable.

 

[jerryk]

What is it about searching that really stresses a system? Is there any alternative that won't overheat my computer? I use it especially to find documents with certain phrases in them or pictures with certain tags.

You are doing the equivalent of telling the system to go into a library and open every book. Then look through all the text or captions for your text. That is a pretty big task. Usually a developer would put this information into a database and search it. Only when they find the subsets of books that have these words are the books retrieved. They also use tricks that let them find root words so an exact match is not required.

 

[robvas]

Searching on windows takes FOREVER