Delaying spotlight indexing to avoid the fan noise

mdsspotlight

I am attending a meeting in a quiet room where everyone has a soft voice, and my mac decides to index for spotlight (the job is 'mds'), bringing the fan to 6200rpm. It's not too bad, just a bit distracting.

How do I tell mds that this is not the right time to do its job? Killing it to delay it could mean that it would choose to start a minute later.

Please note that this is not a case of initial indexing. I don't know (and I don't really care) why mds has a tendency to spend a lot of time not only after inserting a USB flash drive that the machine has not seen in a while, but also after removing that flash drive.

Best Answer

To turn off Spotlight indexing for all mounted volumes:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

See the mdutil man page for other options.

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There a command line tool which you could use: mdutil. Open Terminal.app application and try the following:

To check the indexing status (on|off) for a volume:

thomas$ mdutil -s /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing enabled.

...and to turn indexing off:

thomas$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
Password:
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing disabled.

...or even better disable spotlight activities:

thomas$ sudo mdutil -d /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing and searching disabled.

Calling mdutil without any parameter shows all the allowed parameters

It works with my NAS nfs mount but then it's much smaller than 100TB. It's worth a try nevertheless.

Best Answer

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