MacOS Mojave: Always indexing, the whole OS is too slow

macbook promacosmojave

I've upgraded my MacBook Pro (15-inch 2016 model) to Mojave two weeks ago, and since then I've noticed that the overall performance of the OS has deteriorated, most of times when I open Spotlight search I see the "Indexing" progress bar showing up.

I've switched off Siri and most of the notifications but things are not getting better.

Is there anything to do to resolve this issue?

Best Answer

OK, here's how I solved the issue, I hope this will be useful for anybody with similar issues: I've done some search and found that I needed somehow to fix the indexing files used by spotlight, there are some sudo commands you can use to delete the old index and start all over again, I didn't follow that, I did the following:

  • Open System Preferences -> Spotlight
  • Click on Privacy tab.
  • Open A finder window, navigate to the top most level, drag and drop the "Macintosh HD" icon to the spotlight excluded items in the privacy tab, that way Spotlight will not perform any indexing for the entire hard disk.
  • Then click on the "Macintosh HD" item in the list and click the minus sign button to remove it, this way Spotlight will start indexing from scratch and hopefully succeeds.
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