Disable Spotlight in Leopard?

[JSchur]

Hi

Anyone know a way to disable Spotlight in 10.5? I find it useless and its got my G5 Dual 2.5 sounding like a vacuum cleaner... mdworker eating up 40+ CPU endlessly. I tried the info I found for disabling it in Tiger via the Terminal, but apparently things have changed in Leopard.

Regards

John

[Hal Itosis]

Did you try System Preferences yet?
[Spotlight -> Privacy]

BTW, Time Machine depends heavily on Spotlight... so
while we're throwing out the baby with the bath water,
you may as well erase everything and install Panther.

-HI-

[tlarkin]

Did you upgrade or do a clean install of Leopard? Depending on the OS, something could be caching or paging your virtual memory constantly making your HD work over time. Also, G5s are known to lose thermal calibration and have their fans rev up. You have to recalibrate the thermal sensor, which you can only do with ASD, which is only available to AASPs and Self Maintainers.

[Mikey-San]

Did you upgrade or do a clean install of Leopard? Depending on the OS, something could be caching or paging your virtual memory constantly making your HD work over time. Also, G5s are known to lose thermal calibration and have their fans rev up. You have to recalibrate the thermal sensor, which you can only do with ASD, which is only available to AASPs and Self Maintainers.

If mdworker is chewing up his CPU, his drive (or drives) is (are) probably being indexed. Either he's got a lot of stuff to index, or mdworker is not behaving properly.

JSchur, how long has the mdworker process been using that much CPU?

[tlarkin]

Mikey

long time no see

I am guess that he has lots of crap files (temp files) from the upgrade and it is taking long to index or has other possible hardware issues. I don't ever upgrade I wipe and reload when I load a new OS then copy over back ups. So, I never have a lot of these upgrade issues is why I asked.

[Mikey-San]

Spotlight doesn't index temporary directories, as far as I know.

long time no see

sup

[tlarkin]

I have seen bugs in the spotlight API in applications where it uses spotlight to index and search data only to that application, and instead it goes nuts and tries to search your whole drive for it.

I am not sure if it indexes everything, I was under the impression that it does. I do know however that I have used migration assistant for users that have upgraded in the past and that there are have a few troublesome files that were migrated over. At my old work we had a G4 iMac monitor die on us out of warranty so I gave the user a G5, of course no back ups, so I target mode booted and migrated over his user account. About once a week randomly it would have the beach ball of death. I ran about every freaking test I could find, and the problem never duplicated on a new user account. I deleted everything I could preference and temp wise and it still randomly did the spinning beach ball of death.

[JSchur]

Did you upgrade or do a clean install of Leopard? Depending on the OS, something could be caching or paging your virtual memory constantly making your HD work over time. Also, G5s are known to lose thermal calibration and have their fans rev up. You have to recalibrate the thermal sensor, which you can only do with ASD, which is only available to AASPs and Self Maintainers.

I did an Archive & Install/Preserve Users

[JSchur]

If mdworker is chewing up his CPU, his drive (or drives) is (are) probably being indexed. Either he's got a lot of stuff to index, or mdworker is not behaving properly.

JSchur, how long has the mdworker process been using that much CPU?

I saw it a good bit with previous systems, but it seems to have increased substantially with Leopard. I just took HI's advice and used the Privacy tab in Spotlight Sys Prefs to eliminate some of the locations where I have large numbers of files... we'll see if it makes a difference.

Thanks

John