MacOS – Can spotlight be reset when it misbehaves, is wrong or constantly indexing

macosperformancespotlight

On my 4-month old mid-2012 MacBook Pro I observe that Spotlight seems to want to ALWAYS re-index. I frequently notice that the performance will get unbearably slow and I can hear the hard drive clicking away. Then I go and click the Spotlight icon and sure enough, "Please stand by while we index your hard drive." A few minutes later, it finishes and things return to normal.

Please be aware, I'm NOT talking about the first indexing that can take several hours (or all night). "Just let it finish" is not the answer. This is an issue that has plagued my computer for months. The re-indexing jobs pop up every few minutes and finish a few minutes later.

Something like this

I found an article where somebody is apparently having the same issue, and tried his suggestions to no avail.

I'm at my wit's end! Spotlight is constantly saturating my I/O with its indexing and making my shiny new Mac unbearably slow.

I am grateful for any additional ideas, including more open-ended suggestions about how to go about trouble-shooting such problems in general. Perhaps a command/tool or particular log files which could help me pin down the root cause.

Best Answer

Close all applications and stop Spotlight

sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo mdutil -E /
sudo rm -Rf /var/folders/* 
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*

then reboot and turn Spotlight back on

sudo mdutil -i on /

These commands turn Spotlight indexing off, erase the existing index files and turn spotlight indexing back on.

UPDATE:

According to your latest information the above does not help in long term.

Lets try finding what makes it index.

Disable all areas that you "normally" do no search.

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Add Folders like System to the do not search.

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