I just got a new MacBook Pro, and had it for about a week. What I discovered was that the machine wasn’t as snappy as I thought it would be. It’s a CORE DUO for Christ’s sake, it has not one, but TWO cores, it has 2 GB of freaking RAM! It should be the fastest box around! But no, it’s slow and every once in a while it just locks up for about 5 seconds.

After some fun with fs_usage trying to figure out what was going on, I found the culprit: Spotlight. See, spotlight interacts VERY VERY badly with the file system cache, and since Mac OS X has a unified cache, with the VM cache. This means that while the OS is trying really hard to keep your working set in memory, spotlight (a.k.a. mdimport) is indexing stuff and therefore causing unnecessary flushes of the cache.

The solution? Turn it off. Just run mdutil -i off / and edit /etc/hostconfig to set SPOTLIGHT=-NO- and be done with it. Or if you don’t want to even type that, get Spotless and click away. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

The problems? Mail no longer searches, and no easy and quick way to launch applications. I installed QuickSilver for the application launching part, and will figure out if I can find an alternative for searching mail. But it’s worth it.

My machine is SUPER FAST now, and the disk is quiet all the time. Processors are mostly idle if I’m not doing anything, ah the sound of a high performance machine…​

How badly does Google Desktop Search hinder performance under Windows?