Spotlight indexing slowing down mac

You open a web browser, play Spotify in the background, and launch a few other applications so you can get your work done.

Chances are, your Mac starts to respond slowly. When too many applications are competing to use your system resources, your Mac will run slowly. Sure, saving icons and items on the Desktop makes it handy for you to access without extra clicks. But a cluttered Desktop can seriously slow down your Mac, according to Lifehacker. Plus, a cluttered Desktop can make you feel disorganized. However, for those users who process visually, using an Alias or shortcut on your Desktop gives you the icon without the system demands of that file or folder.

Mac Dashboard services as a secondary Desktop for hosting widgets — simple applications that allow you quick access, such as a calculator or weather forecast that you use daily. But having too many widgets can slow down your computer as well. Just as running multiple applications does, widgets on your Dashboard can take up quite a bit of RAM source: This is probably the most critical cause that leads to a slow Mac. You may need a more powerful processor. Also, this Apple discussion reveals that if there are bad or failing sectors on the drive, which can substantially slow down read speeds. If you regularly use your Mac for gaming, you may find the overall experience a bit choppy.

Helpful answers

Nothing slows a Mac more than having too much on a hard drive, according to iMore. As a Mac fan, you probably know there are two kinds of Macs based on microprocessors: PowerPC and Intel. Since , all Macs have been built on Intel cores. If you used an older Mac and decided to migrate data from a different mac CPU type, e. Credit to Abraham Brody , a Mac tech support geek.

Every day you use a web browser e. Safari, Chrome, FireFox , you generate junk files such as caches, history, plugins, extensions, etc. With the passage of time, these files can take up a lot of storage space as well as impact the speed of your web browsing.

macbook - MacOS Mojave: Always indexing, the whole OS is too slow - Ask Different

For example: Sometimes when your web browser is slow to load the pages you want to view, you may blame your Mac. It could be an older router, weak wifi signal, too many other devices connected, etc. Yes, the OS X operating system is more secure than Windows. But hey, it can get viruses as well. According to ComputerHope , as Apple Macintosh computers gain market share and are used by more people, virus are becoming more common than they used to be.

There is a lot of bad software out there. If you download applications with unverified developers, or from non-authorized sites, chances are these applications can make your Mac slower by unnecessarily hogging the CPU or RAM.

22 Reasons Why Your Mac Runs Slower Than it Should

Also, according to Apple, peer-to-peer file sharing and torrent software can turn your machine into a software server, which will slow down your internet connection. Many users report it could take hours. See this Apple support article for what to do when the backup takes ages. This has happened to me before. Every time I connected my iPhone or iPad to my Mac, it started to freeze.

Once I disabled it, the hang-up disappeared. Learn more from this Apple support discussion. Looking for a better alternative to iTunes? Go get AnyTrans review here. Similar to iTunes, Apple iCloud syncing can also decelerate performance. It can also cause several other linked services email, Photos, FindMyiPhone, etc. See this example as reported by Parmy Olson from Forbes.

How to Fix Spotlight Indexing in OS X

Not long ago, Apple reminded users that Mac Mail might unexpectedly quit when displaying a message that is malformed or damaged. I suffered from this twice: In both cases, my Mac seriously hung. Jonny Evans explains how to rebuild and reindex mailboxes step-by-step in a ComputerWorld post.

El Capitan features speed improvements from 4x faster PDF rendering to 1. Tom Nelson, a Macs expert, says that Apple supplies firmware updates from time to time, and although very few people have any trouble after installing them, problems do crop up now and then. Incorrect firmware may cause a Mac to function sluggishly among other issues. Make sure you always keep the firmware up-to-date.

Fix Your Spotlight Search Results By Forcing Spotlight To Re-index [OS X Tips]

If the permissions on your Macintosh hard drive are damaged, everything could slow down along with unusual behavior. This kind of problem occurs more often on old PowerPC Macs. To repair such permission errors, use Disk Utility. Learn more from this post , written by Randy Singer. Spotlight is a great feature that enables you to quickly find and access files in the system. You even locate the file manually to verify its existence — and that of the specific text contents.

Unless you explicitly exclude the file from being searched, it's clear that Spotlight's index is damaged and needs fixing. The solution is to rebuild the Spotlight index, and this can be done quite easily. Then, click on the Privacy tab at the top of the panel. Let's pause and take a look at Spotlight's Privacy panel. You know, everyone's got at least one folder they don't want others to perform searches on. A more likely example though, would be this: This will preclude search results listing files on the clone. If you were to access the files on the clone drive, you would stand a pretty good chance of unintended file editing or deletion, version skew and an overall bad day at the computer.

You'll notice a little instruction blurb at the top of the Spotlight Privacy panel that succinctly tells you what you need to do to exclude items from being indexed. Alternatively, you can simply drag-and-drop folder and drive icons directly onto the list to exclude them from indexing.

OK, so you know how to add items to the exclusion list. So, what about fixing a corrupted index? Here's the technique for re-indexing an entire drive the same can be done to just re-index individual folders. As already explained, this action tells the system to exclude the drive from Spotlight indexing.

More importantly, it also deletes any existing index. If prompted for confirmation, click OK.

By the way, you can only add folders or volumes that you have ownership permissions for to the Privacy list. Here's the critical step: Finally, close Spotlight Preferences. Spotlight now proceeds to re-index the contents of the volume; this occurs in the background. Depending on how much data is on the drive, this can take a considerable amount of time — hours, in fact.

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However, you can continue to work with only a slight performance hit due to disk activity. By the way, Spotlight will automatically re-index when you perform major OS X upgrades for example, when going from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion , when you reinstall OS X from scratch, and when you do a full-drive recovery from Time Machine.

I know A teeny-tiny dot, only a couple of molecules across, pulsates right in the center of the Spotlight's magnifying glass on the right side of the Mac's menu bar. I love that dot! It makes me happy. It tells me that Spotlight is chugging along just fine. Only thing is, starting in Mountain Lion, I noticed that this dot only appears initially, while determining which files need indexing.