MacOS – How to fix slow Spotlight and Time Machine after upgrading to 10.7.5

macosspotlighttime-machine

Since updating to 10.7.5 both Spotlight and Time Machine are very slow.

To index a normal system drive Spotlight calculates to need several days.
As a result Time Machine takes up to an hour or more for an incremental backup of ~100 Mib.

What solution is there for these slow Time Machine backups and Spotlight indexing?

Best Answer

The OS X Lion 10.7.5 Supplemental Update released October 04, 2012 includes:

Resolves an issue that may cause Time Machine backups to take a very long time to complete

and, after testing, this seems to have completely resolved the issue.

Note that for me, the first backup after installing this update still took unexpectedly long, and included many com.apple.backupd[423]: Waiting for index to be ready (100) messages, so maybe Spotlight hadn't yet properly re-indexed the drive. Now, a couple hours later, small backups complete at their usual brisk pace and all is well.

Related Solutions

Mac – Time Machine backup is slow. How to speed it up

On El Capitan to High Sierra OS - the io is throttled in some cases. You can review these steps in case they apply in your case. Not everyone sees this speed up, but it shouldn’t be hard to test and reverse if it doesn’t help you. Anyone on Mojave and newer should look to other fixes like testing a backup to a blank or erased drive.

Time Machine ridiculously slow after El Capitan upgrade

The throttle should be evident in observing the backupd usage of the filesystem:

sudo fs_usage backupd

Writing a command to /etc/sysctl.conf and then restarting should disable that throttle:

echo 'debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

Or without restarting:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

You'll want to watch for other performance issues (extra CPU usage, other IO slowing, increased energy usage when backing up) after making that low level system tuning adjustment.

MacOS – Time Machine/Time Capsule: What is the difference between “Waiting for index to be ready (100)” and “Waiting for index to be ready (101)”

The answer to your question is that the difference between these two codes (100 and 101) is not publicly documented by apple.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23429422?ac_cid=op123456#23429422

However pondini.org/TM/D2.html gives reasons why and how to fix those errors, and the issues you are experiencing.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Mac – Time Machine backup is slow. How to speed it up

MacOS – Time Machine/Time Capsule: What is the difference between “Waiting for index to be ready (100)” and “Waiting for index to be ready (101)”

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