Spotlight woes

clee01l

clee01l

Senior Member
Lightroom Guru
Premium Classic Member
Premium Cloud Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2009
Messages
24,229
Location
Houston, TX USA
Lightroom Experience
Power User
Lightroom Version
Cloud Service
I have restricted Spotlight from indexing most of my computer area including first one, now two external Image volumes. The last check shows "mds_stores" consuming 123GB of memory on my 64GB M2 Ultra Mac Studio. My Mac version is 15.4.1 recently updated. When I try to exclude certain folders (like Pictures), I get an error message : "Privacy List Error The item couldn’t be added or removed because of an unknown error."

Needless to say Spotlight has slowed my Lightroom process to a crawl.

A search of the web does not give me any information for stopping Spotlight from running, only from accessing certain folders and volumes which I have already done.

Any other suggestions?
 
I came across this previously . Will try to dig up url later this evening.

You may have come across this already.


1745423890541.jpeg
 
karl.nyhus said:
https://cleanmymac.com/faq/how-to-turn-off-spotlight-search-on-mac

Also, https://iboysoft.com/tips/spotlight-mds-stores-writes-vast-data-after-sequoia-update.html. See section called "Solution 3: Disable Spotlight Search"
Click to expand...
I ran into a little problem in that the process requires a cold restart in Safe mode and due to issues that I don't yet fully understand, I am unable to restart my computer ({Cmd}{R}) in safe mode.

However, I have since found this Terminal command that will prevent spotlight from indexing all devices:
$ sudo mdutil -a -i off
Click to expand...
 
I'm lost here. I've only used Spotlight to do searches for things I can't find. Mostly leftovers from apps I've deleted. Everything seems to be running OK. What should I know regrading this issue? It seems like you can do more with Spotlight than I'm aware of.
 
Zenon said:
I'm lost here. I've only used Spotlight to do searches for things I can't find. Mostly leftovers from apps I've deleted. Everything seems to be running OK. What should I know regrading this issue? It seems like you can do more with Spotlight than I'm aware of.
Click to expand...

The issue (for me) seems to be that since a recent update to Sequoia, the Spotlight task “mds_stores” is constantly consuming ~160GB of my 64GB M2 Ultra memory. I think this maybe related to the inclusion of Siri and other AI features into Spotlight.

I have 12 volumes mounted and Spotlight wants to by default index all of them. The search box in the upper right corner of a Finder dialog uses Spotlight to find what you might want to look for.

If for example, you remove all of them images and volumes containing images searching for an image returns no results with Spotlight turned off. Currently, I am cleaning up my image inventory and need Spotlight to find all copies of an image and perhaps master images that somehow were removed from my master catalog.

Since my last post, I have re-included all volumes and reenabled Spotlight. “Mds_stores” is back to consuming ~160GB of memory but this does not seem to be impacting my LrC performance like it was when I started this thread.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
What a difficult scenario to have to deal with.

My instinct is that my performance issues related to Outlook (on windows 11) was caused by Microsoft experimenting / introducing ai functionality… so not just Apple testing boundaries.

Luckily, I can use a superb 3rd party too called Everything on Windows which replaces totally (and is a dream to use and so reliable) Windows indexing.

Are there 3rd party Mac indexing apps worth exploring, either to temp get around the current issues or as a contingency for ongoing issues in this area.
 
Gnits said:
Microsoft experimenting / introducing ai functionality… so not just Apple testing boundaries.
Click to expand...
I'm thinking the same with Apple and their new AI (Apple Intelligence) and Siri features included in Spotlight.

In crafting this response, it dawned on me that there might be a way to disable Apple Intelligence (AI). And it turns out there is. In Preferences there is a section for "Apple Intelligence & Siri". Apple Intelligence can be disabled separate from Siri. I'll let you know id there is a difference in performance and usage.
As a side note, you can choose a different voice dialect for Siri to respond, I have chosen Irish ;-)
 
I checked mine today and it was just over 100mb. Good info. Something I was never aware of.
 
I'm new to MACos and while I am grateful for their security capabilities, sometimes it goes overboard. I found I couldn't access another computer by either host.local or it's IP address with Chrome but could with FireFox. Finally found there is a security setting JUST for local network access. All other apps had it enabled but not Chrome. Also found that MACos was asking if I wanted to allow an app to have full disk access even though I had previously said yet.

Spotlight has been a pain because it's not smart enough to know it can't use an exFAT disk it doesn't have write access to but continually tries to write its files anyway. I had to do configuration, like @clee01l did, on what Spotlight actually indexes. And I thought Windows Indexer was a pain.
 
clee01l said:
Have you ever found any malware in your MacOS computer? Can you say the same for WindowsOS? "Overboard" is good.
Click to expand...
Maybe a poor choice of words. The issue is when a problem occurs is it in the app or MACos? Is there somewhere, for example, where I can see that access was blocked by the MACos because of a security setting? In the example of Chrome access to .local that would have eliminated chasing down potential Chrome configuration issues related to .local access. As it was, it took several Google searches to under the 'Local Network' setting. The other concern was how to got turned off since it previously worked.

So, yes, grateful for the lack of malware, not so for stumbling around finding security settings.
 
Paul_DS256 said:
Maybe a poor choice of words. The issue is when a problem occurs is it in the app or MACos? Is there somewhere, for example, where I can see that access was blocked by the MACos because of a security setting? In the example of Chrome access to .local that would have eliminated chasing down potential Chrome configuration issues related to .local access. As it was, it took several Google searches to under the 'Local Network' setting. The other concern was how to got turned off since it previously worked.

So, yes, grateful for the lack of malware, not so for stumbling around finding security settings.
Click to expand...
I agree that Apple does make it difficult to find and understand security settings. Likely this it to make it difficult for malefactors to find and exploit vulnerabilities.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top