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Tiger Spotlight Less Then Optimal
Anonymous Coward writes "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted.
Additionally, Spotlight doesn't come with a manual to teach you how to create complex queries. Most simple available queries --style popup menu selection-- are not powerful enough to be really useful.
A tutorial on http://www.scribent.com/ will explain how you can optimize Spotlight's behaviour and get the most of it, but all in all it seems like Apple has been overhyping in the extremes."
So all the article says is that the Silver Bullet or Holy Grail of Searching didn't turn out to be something one could create simply by telling the programmers to do it?
Apple (and MS for that matter) try to create a system where you don't have to keep any order on your computer and find anything you want instantly. I am sure I am not the only one with a gut-feeling that this is closer to the area of unsolvable problems, right with "Making Software Idiotproof" and "Creating the perfect user-interface everyone can use without any prior computer experience" and "Creating a 100% secure computer on the internet",...
Linux is not Windows
Silas
After posting that, it might be nice to elaborate.
I've heard others say that it cripples their machines, even the new iMacs. I've got a iBook that's just had its first year, and I don't see the problems. I don't get any slowdowns or have to wait ages for results from my 60GB drive (of which around 55GB is used). I've got around 300,000 files at the moment.
Apparently someone chained 23 Firewire drives together, and then complained about the performance of Spotlight. Not the most realistic example (who would need that set-up but wouldn't have invested in either fewer, larger drives or a server?).
How does Spotlight go on OS X Server, running on a real server box? I don't know that one, but I'd be curious to find out.
I've heard about problems in searching for word fragments inside other words.
If I type "ding" (knowing full well I have a Word document titled 'building my PC.doc'), Spotlight fails to find it. If I type "buil" it comes up straight away. Could that be a problem? Well, in this example no - but that's mainly because I'd never search for the second syllable like that.
Does a search for "PC" turn the file up? Yes it does. So... this seems to indicate that I can't search for the middle of words, just the beginning of them. Not really an issue for me, but I can see that someone with filenames like "BuildingPC" might have trouble.
Actually... not at all!
I just made a duplicate of the file "Building My PC.doc" and renamed the copy to "BuildingMyPC.doc". When I went to Spotlight to search for it, my last search for "PC" turned this file up without me having to type anything in at all!
What about the file search box (Command-F in the Finder)? Acts just the same. No lock-ups on my machine, no problems outside of those reported in the Ars Technica review last month.
I see a lot more happiness with Spotlight users than unhappiness. I guess that's what they mean when they say "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'."
For what it is worth I haven't had most of the problems being described. I use spotlight every day and while advanced queries are nice (and a manual would be even nicer) simple queries are *far* from "not powerful enough to be really useful."
Sure, it has some issues (report them to apple as bugs when you find them, it is the only way they know about them), but it is fast and it Works For Me(TM).
Now if only someone would create a LaTeX mdimporter...
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I've had a lot of problems with Spotlight. When I have a large external hard drive (160GB divided into 3 partitions) attached, I will find at random times that the processes mds and LAServer will start eating all of my CPU. This occurs despite the fact that all of my drives, including the external, have already been completely indexed. I've tried re-indexing (sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/volname), I've tried disabling indexing alltogether ( sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/volname). None of these solutions worked. The only thing that has kept my CPU usage normal is leaving my external drive disconnected, although I've found that that only decreases the frequency of these mds attacks, not prevents them entirely.
I've also been experiencing frustrations with slow file copying (especially with rsync) that I suspect to be Spotlight- or metadata-related.
All in all it's been a pretty frustrating upgrade (actually, clean install to be exact) for me. I hope these issues are addressed in 10.4.2 (yes, I've submitted bug reports).
That being said, I'm not saying *someone* will find it useful, but really, it just looks like an attempt to move Firefox's "Find in page" functionality to the OS level.
I haven't noted any major performance hits either, and my current use of Tiger has been limited to a 1GHz Powerbooks, which usually gets a LaCie FireWire drive hooked up to it.
In fact, the only problem I've had with Tiger is that the UT2004 demo doesn't run under it (it's a work machine and I don't have an Apple at home, so I can't justify running out and buying the actual game, which has an update out that supposedly resolves the issue).
I talk about stuff.
Here's a link for anyone wondering what the Tiger Spotlight is. (In short: With Spotlight, you can find anything on your computer as quickly as you type. Search your entire system from one place: Files, emails, contacts, images, calendars and applications appear instantly.)
(By the way, here's a direct link to the article in question.)
Anyway, call me oldfashioned but an Anonymous Coward writing "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users" is hardly the end of the world. Innovative interfaces may be "major pain" for an AC on Slashdot but meanwhile a lot of people in the Real World find it very useful (pun not intended), all the "overhyping in the extremes" (or even overhyping to the max) notwithstanding. Don't like it? Don't use it! Simple as that. Fortunately, as always with Apple, there's more than one way to do it. Do you think that Microsoft's SQL filesystem works better? Use Longhorn then.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > + > (Choose your hard drives)
Not exactly 'turning it off' but it does stop it indexing and therefore chewing system performance.
cant you just drag the hard drive into the exceptions list and it will permanently stop the indexing ?
I've used Spotlight to help me organize my GROWING documents folder. Each and every document I've created since owning my first Macintosh SE in 1989 is in there. It's a mess. I started pulling the low-hanging fruit out first: Invoices and Taxes. Spotlight has been a GREAT help.
Once O'Reily comes out with Spotlight:The Definitive Guide, Spotlight:The Missing Manual, or Spotlight in a Nutshell I will make more effective use of it.
--Mike
Shouldn't the "then" in the title be replaced with "than?"
I wonder what the expectations were for anyone that is disappointed by Spotlight.
... you get the idea. Sure if you haven't been using keywords until now you have your work cut out for you (although KA again comes to the rescue with a nice interface for adding new keywords). But if you have, then Spotlight is incredibly and totally awesome! Those searches bring up the standard spotlight results page, I can browse the returned pictures and even run a nice slideshow: all without even launching iPhoto!
I started off my Tiger use by messing around with Spotlight. "Wow, all the emails I ever sent to [name]!" "Cool, any word document that has [project] in title!" etc.
Then I thought about some of the complex and hard to maintain folder hierarchies I have. The folder system made it generally easy to find my files, but only if I was using them in a manner that I had expected when I started the organization. Spotlight could be the answer, I thought.
So I took a non-critical directory nest and used my existing folder system and Automator to quickly add spotlight comments to the files. (Select all files in [proj_A directory], add [proj_A] comment to files.)
Now I could hit command-space and type in a key phrase or two and get all the files in a nice menu. Clicking on "show all" brings up a nice, and constantly updated finder window for the search. Ah, now we're getting somewhere.
So I created some smart folders based on current criteria (and a few theoretical cases). Woo! Now I have a dynamic directory structure! Add a few custom Automator plug-ins (so I can right click files and do expected actions like "Move file to [dir] and add comment [helpful metadata]".)
Smart folders (driven by Spotlight) in email is pretty handy also. A couple weeks ago my wife and I were having our yard landscaped. This, naturally, involved a lot of emails back and forth with the landscapers over plant choice, guidelines, schedules, etc. So rather than setup a rule and folder for something temporary; I right clicked on the landscaper's email address and clicked "Create a smart folder". Ta da! Now I don't even have to care where the email goes, any email from the landscapers is all grouped together. When the work was finished, I deleted the smart mailbox and the clutter was gone. I still have their emails in my general sub-inbox should I have to refer to something. All emails and advice are still just a quick spotlight search away. For example: "water magnolia" to find the watering advice for our new tree.
And then there's iPhoto. With the help of the excellent iPhoto Keyword Assistant I have been diligently adding metadata to all of my digital photos. While KA fixes one of iPhoto's big shortcomings (an awful interface to the keywords, especially if you have a lot); using the keywords was still clunky. You have to start iPhoto, open up a special sub-window and then click on the keywords you want. This interface is barely acceptable when you only have a dozen keywords; when you have five dozen it is quickly painful.
Spotlight fixes this. It includes searching by iPhoto keyword!* So I can start up a spotlight seach, type "obx sunset" to see all the sunset pictures I've taken at the Outer Banks. Or "munich" for all the pictures of Munich, or "munich cathedrals"
* There have been reports of problems with this working for some people, and I was one of them. It seems that when spotlight finishes it major index, it still has some indexing tasks left in the background and iPhoto keywords are one of those. I noticed that a spotlight keyword search only worked partially at first. Any photos I had recently worked on or added were in, and sporadic other photos as well. So I created a keyword called "temp" and added it to every photo, then deleted it. After that all of my photos were indexed.
Spotlight has even changed how I launch applications. I used to have a dock chock full of any applications I might launch.
I have got to agree. i just downloaded the www.neooffice.org spotlight plugin. It indexs all of my Open Office files.
I can type in a sentence from one of those files and it pops right up. I often find myself knowing part of a quote but not the filename where the rest of the quote is located. I type it in. and there it is.
Indexing took literally minutes on my powerbook, and just a few hundred open Office files.
My biggest compaliant is that it looks like Apple took MSFT fisher price colour scheme for it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Call it "floodlight"?
No problems with it either, until I tried the tips given in this very tutorial. Not only didn't they work, but Spotlight stopped working, and I had to re-index the drive ! I'll continue using it like I always have done, and where it shines : simple searches. And like you I'll wait for some good book about it.
Macintouch has a report with a lot more info.
Then after a few more hours, it sometimes didn't immediately started re-indexing, so results apeared. [snip]
I have seen the same behaviour, but only immediately after I installed Tiger. The problem is, indexing harddisks takes LOTS of time. Twelve hours of work for a 60 GB disk is perfectly reasonable, and for older systems it may well take longer.
The problem is that during that time Spotlight sometimes thinks it has indexed enough to be helpful, and allows user queries. It then has problems coping with the queries. It should be more strict.
In short: give Spotlight time to do its job and these problems will go away.
According to the very page you linked, this hint "does kill searching in Mail.app", so you fix A and break B, so it's kinda, you know, like, a no-hint. :-(
It's poorly documented, but Spotlight is actually more versatile than it looks.
Indexing takes a long time at first of course, but once it has done all files once, further indexing is incremental. When a file is created, written, moved or deleted, it is indexed at that time. So that happens only one or two files at a time and has little impact. When a volume is mounted though, it has to do some looking to see what changed, and it might have to index a lot of files if there have been a lot of changes.
To not index a volume you can list it under the privacy tab in System Preferences. Or if you know you never care what is in a pile of files of a particular kind, such as music files, you can turn off that type of files in the Preferences as well.
In searches, you can use AND, OR, NOT, LITERAL, and parenthesis to make some pretty decent search strings. But you don't use those words, you do it like this: A space means AND. The "|" means OR. A "-" prefix means NOT. And putting a phrase in quotes finds it literally.
So "this that" means find files with both "this" and "that" while "this|that" mean find this _or_ that. Using "-this" finds files that do not have "this" in them. Putting a phrase in quotes means find the exact phrase. And parens are for grouping as usual.
And if you are a geek, congratulations! You can check spotlight programming docs and use a raw query string. For this, you have to use the Finder "Find..." command. In the "Kind" popup menu, choose "Other..." and a list of a whole ton of cool attributes appears. In there is "Raw Query" and you can use the raw search "language". For examples of raw query strings, make a Smart Folder with any query. Then do Get Info on the Smart Folder itself (folders are in ~/Library/Saved Searches) and you'll see the raw query.
Have fun! - Lepton
Apparently someone chained 23 Firewire drives together, and then complained about the performance of Spotlight. Not the most realistic example
Video editors tend to use firewire drives like people used to use floppy or Zip disks -- they've stacks of them and are plugging them in or moving them around to grab stuff. I agree that's a "ghetto" way of doing things, but one of the selling points of the Mac is that it's a cheap video platform, so not everyone's buying big storage RAIDs.
I haven't noticed any particular problems with spotlight, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a global option to disable indexing.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
if apple had been trumpeting "UNIX SYSADMINS: NEVER USE GREP AGAIN!" then they would have been over-hyping in the extreme. as it is, spotlight is the best answer we currently have to "i saved my thingie and now i can't find it!" syndrome. it has its flaws, and some will be ironed out. what's the big deal? besides, it is possible to turn it off - google for turn spotlight off. done.
I find Spotlight useful as a sort of primitive command line. Use Cmd-Space, then enter the name of an application (e.g. "Firefox"), and the app is right there in the menu for you to click on. This is nice, since the traditional methods for launching apps suck (digging through the Applications folder is slow; putting everything in the dock adds clutter).
Unfortunately, it seems that the search path is limited, and I haven't figured out a way to change it. For example, typing "Kerberos" in the search box fails to locate the ticket manager, which is in /Library/CoreServices. You would think that with all this fancy technology, Spotlight would be able to do everything that the Unix "locate" command can handle, but apparently that is not the case. So, if anyone from Apple is watching this thread, I'd like to offer that as a request for enhancement!
Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted.
Just how did this AC arrive that the "many users" thing? Was there a poll among all Tiger users? How about "some" or "a couple" or "a few" or "one or two guys I just happened to know" instead? Sort of changes the whole story, right? This sort of thing is one of the reasons why people are turning away from the tradition media: They are sick and tired of everything being hyped. Please, just the facts, OK?
For the record: I use Spotlight on my aging iBook G4 800 MHz and don't see any speed problems. If anything, Tiger is a lot faster than Panther was (and my hardware doesn't even support those nifty Core whatever features). If you are that much into speed tuning, I suggest looking into Gentoo.